INBOUND 2016: Adam Steinhardt "How To Transform Your Ecosystem into an Inbound Sales Powerhouse"

Okay, thanks very much for coming. I appreciate you guys had choices, some tough choices. Going up against the HubSpot product guys, showing off all the cool stuff. It's not that good. You're a better session. Now, obviously, I'm Australian and just a shout out who's from Australia in the room. All right. Love it. So you guys are going to understand everything I say. There's a high chance, though, that those of you from other places may not. So I've especially for the moment, bought our very own American Australian translator. So here's Eve. So Eve's from America, part of the Kingdom team. Now, what she's going to do if I say something crazy, culturally inappropriate or some slang. I used a great slang word yesterday. I was freaking out like a blue arse fly. And I was talking to the head of partner services for HubSpot and he's like a blue ass flight. I am totally going to be using that one tomorrow in my speech. So she'll help out in those crazy events where the Australian takes over the sensible. But righto. We're going to get stuck into a pretty rapid slideshow today, and I'm going to be talking about how to transfer your sales ecosystem to really do what Dharmesh and Brian talked about, which is change, embrace change. And one of the things we see as a Humspot partner working with both marketing teams and with salespeople is that the sales processes are typically dated and based on a bygone era. But to understand that really well, what we're going to do is go through the history of sales very quickly. The history of sales, it's got us to this stage. We're at the golden age of the consumer now. The history of sales really started about 20,000 years ago when blokes were catching fish at a marketplace, cobblestones. And one guy is shouting, saying, this is the fresh fish. And the opposition guy on this side of the counter with all this av, no doubt was saying, this is a fresher fish. This fish is more amazing, it's bigger, it's a better tasting fish. And the two of these traders would have this battle talking about how amazing their product was. They'd be talking about the feats and benefits to the consumer. And so they'll leisurely walk through the marketplace. You'd check it out and say, okay, I'm going to make a decision based on what those guys are telling me. Based on what those guys are telling me. Printing press evolves and we have printed matter. Printed matter can actually start telling people things fast. Forward to the 19th century. And then you've got the door to door traveling salesperson. The door to door travelling salesperson. What an easy job that would have been. That was typically men. Typically men. In fact, in Australia, I don't know if they're here, Eve, but we used to have the commercial hotels in every single village and town, usually connected by a railroad. And those hotels were for the blokes that had the big suitcases full of things. They had a great advantage. Imagine knocking on the door and the housewife opens up and the guy's selling a vacuum cleaner. And the housewife has never seen a vacuum cleaner before. Amazed husband comes home three hours later, oh, darling, I bought a vacuum cleaner. Check it out. Wow, that's amazing. Products back in those days, the information came from the salespeople, and the salespeople would go to each different region. And the way that you grew sales in those days was to get more salespeople, open up more territories. And we're talking at the turn of the century, more people, more territories, more sales. Fast forward, the radio comes out and then we have the beginning, almost of content marketing, where the procter and gambles of the world started advertising soap cat commercials to the housewives who are at home. And that's the soap opera era, actually placing information into their ears. At the time, they were working with various bits and pieces. We go forward again to the age of tv. Who's watched Mad Men? It's a great show. Love it. Awesome. Just awesome looking at it. But really, the interesting episode is when the geeky guy, well, we're all kind of geeky, but the geeky guy starts saying how amazing this TV thing's going to be. And nobody really believed him. The art department and the other creators were Pooh pari. But of course, TV comes through and we go back to that history of screaming at each other when it comes to sales. We start screaming in that 30 seconds because the accounting guys and the CEO and the directors want return on investment for that buy of 30 seconds. Which means you've got to squash as much as you possibly can of price and feature to get the sales so it can justify the spend for the TV commercial. And we lived that for a long time, frustratingly so, growing up. Two, three channels, no video recorders. I don't look that old, but it was a time when it was like that. And so we then see along the way, the evolvement for business using yellow Pages. Is that what they call them here, Eric? Yellow Pages? So Yellow Pages, they're effectively the first version of Google, when you think about it, alphabetized, listed fingers do the walking. It was incredible. Back in the old days of sales starting, or I say the old days in 1990, starting Nextbyte as a business, you had the Yellow Pages deadline. And the creative for the Yellow Pages was the single most stressful event in a business because if you miss the Yellow Pages deadline and you got your creative wrong, you spent an entire year, an entire year waiting for the next edition. Some people never threw those Yellow Pages out. So it's a critical business decision. Amazingly, today my mobile still gets calls from a butcher. Somebody's chasing the butcher because the butcher got the phone number wrong in his Yellow Pages ad. It doesn't call very often though, which is interesting. And I am thinking about getting some sausages in the fridge just to clean up on the side so the yellow pagers comes through and then we graduate to this cool thing called the Internet. Who can remember the first time they saw the Internet? 94, 95. Just incredible. I remember being like, Adelaide, South Australia, could not really be more further away than America. It's like it's kind of Adelaide, Tasmania, Penguins, Antarctica. So for those Democrats, you can jump on a plane tomorrow and get as far away from America if you like. I can see a few of you enjoying that. Interesting enough, I did read this morning, immigration stats in New Zealand have soared in the last couple of days. So getting back to the point, the Yellow Pages, when you had the Internet, of course, what you had with the Internet was a fabulous 14,400 board modem, super quick, that crazy sound. And you'd sit there and you'd wait for the damn thing to load. And if somebody called you on your Internet line, you were screwed. You had to start all over again. Interruptive marketing. So what we did as business owners and salespeople, we took our Yellow Pages ad and we said, you know what, I don't know about this Internet thing? Who's actually going to look at it? And you weren't sure. And so we took the very same Yellow Pages ad and we stuck it into the Internet. We had a little picture and some links and suddenly we discovered those gradient button creating programs. And they were amazing, crazy swirls of color. And we pretty much said, buy my stuff on the Internet. Then of course, the big revolution was Minyahu, Netscape. I actually once sat next to a bloke at Social Media Marketing World a couple of years ago and we sort of sat down. I was having my fourth beer and he was just starting out that's what we do in Australia because we fly so long, we drink hard, we party hard, because, you know, we've got 30 hours on the plane back home to rest. But I had a chat to the dude and I said, what are you doing? So I'm the marketing manager of Yahoo. This is two years ago. I said, oh, that couldn't be much funny. He said, no, it's a terrible job. I said, well, what's the market share really like? He said, well, they've got 98. Google, I've got about 0.5 to 2. OK, you're pretty miserable. Yeah, it's not fun. But Yahoo, they blew it. But they had the power of search back in those days. And of course with Google, that comes along in the late 90s and suddenly you can start discovering stuff in the computers and along with that the computers get a bit faster and the Internet starts picking up adsl ISDN starts coming in, getting a bit quicker and suddenly we're starting to realize there's something about this Internet thing that's kind of cool and if your employee allowed you, you could do a bit of surfing at work and start discovering the first E commerce stores and HTML email was coming out. Gary Vee talked last night about the huge open rates that he had back in those days. From there, the big, big change, though, what do you reckon the biggest change was in this whole Internet gig in 2000? Yeah. Who's ever used wop? Do you guys remember wop? Stupidest thing ever. Okay. How could you possibly watch a website on the smallest Nokia phone didn't exist. Now the Nokia phone was great because they had four days of battery. Bring that baby back. But of course, on 28 June, in 2007, Apple released the iPhone, the smartphone and that changed everything. And that is where the true golden age of the consumer began. Because all of a sudden we as consumers had all of the power. Prior to that, if you wanted to go and buy a car or go and buy any other product, you had to do the research as a consumer and you would rely on the salespeople to provide you with that information. So if you went to buy a car in Australia, we have long streets of car yards. I'm guessing it's the same. Thank you, Eve. She's from America, Florida. Give her a round of applause. Florida, Yep. She's currently updating her Facebook status. She's heard all this stuff before, so she's not that interested anyway. So you'd actually be tyre kicking down the street and you'd Have a look at a couple of car yards and you have a chat to the guys and you had really no idea what you were buying unless you were gifted in a motor vehicle way. And you'd go to the next one, and you'd go to the next one and you'd slowly start to build up your understanding. You'd be praying that you weren't getting fleeced by the car guy. So much so that you actually called the AAA service, the RIA service, is that right? Eve Triple A service, and get those guys to do an inspection on the car to make sure it was the right thing and you weren't actually getting ripped off. And then you begrudgingly gave across your money. And of course, still to this day, car resellers are ranked as the most sleazy salespeople on earth, just behind real estate agents. Any real estate agents in the crowd, See you know when not to show up. Any accountants in the crowd? Good. Was that one? No. Good. Okay, so getting back to the point, we have this situation where the consumer was scared and the consumer affairs businesses created Caveat Empton, the protection services for consumers. You were able to go to government places and have your complaints about what the sales people are doing to protect consumers. Now the smartphone changed everything though. So now we enter the golden age of the consumer. Because all of a sudden, as a consumer, we have all of the information at our fingertips. 24, 7, in the shops, in bed, everywhere we go. Who sleeps with their iPhone? Come on, admit it, there's more of you. There's more of you. It's there all the time. For us. Buying a car these days, you just log on to carsales.com and you start researching. I just recently Bought a Lexus LS460 on the web. Took 18 months of research. So when I spoke to the car guy, I called him up, say my local Lexus dealer in Adelaide and said, g', day mate, it's Adam here. We've known each other for a while. Look, I'm looking for a 2008 LS 460. I'd like it in silver. I'd to like. I want it to have done 49,000km on the clock. There's two in the Gold coast, there's one in Sydney, there's three in Perth. The price is 49.95 to 52,000. Have you got any? Completely armed with every single little bit of detail. And if I got a salesperson that was telling me that it was 17 inch rims, not 19, I knew he was Lying because I had done the research and I also had my phone in my pocket to check it. So sellers, the traditional way of selling is gone as consumers. And Marcus Sheridan, who's seen Marcus Sheridan speak before. Okay, he's on tomorrow morning. He's amazing. He's one of the great pioneers of content marketing from the reality of the sales face. So definitely check him out. But he talks a lot about this whole 70%, the golden moment when the consumer actually wants reaches out to you in sales. They've done a minimum of 70% of the research before they speak to you as a sales business and in some cases like the car yard, it's at 98% where all the research has been done, all the research that's been done before. I actually go and get to that point in time. So how far down the sales funnel are your customers in the different businesses you're in? Nobody's at zero. They were back when computers were not in your pocket. But now nobody's at zero and everybody is moving down the funnel and where are they going to be in 2024 and where are they going to be in 2030 and is your business ready for that situation? Are you ready? How far down the funnel are your prospects? We are now in the golden age of the consumers. The death of buyer beware. It is now 100% seller beware. Seller beware. And this is why change is needed. The modern day process of selling requires a major overhaul in your thinking. It requires a major overhaul in your entire organizational ecosystem to implement the changes to bring back the power to your business. It'll never be the same again. But you do need to be overhauling it so you can at least take advantage of some of the tools that the consumers are using to make it very hard for you to do business. Brian spoke about the oversupply of product, the ease of entry to the marketplace, the speed at which Internet businesses can annihilate you. The cab industry, everyone talks about it. A good point made by Gary Vee is why didn't they think of it? Because they couldn't be bothered. And still to this day in Australia, the response to the taxi cabs is unbelievably terrible. They still charge us 10% cab charge. They do that here. 10% on charge for a cab charge in Australia, which is a credit card use. They haven't changed the thing. They're still more expensive and we all just use Uber. They Gonski and one of the most important changes that's needed, in fact this is a stage Moment upon stage, one of the most important things is the coming out of you as people. Who's a marketing person here? Very good. Who's an accountant? Just testing. Any real estate agents sneak in unsuspected. Who is a salesperson? Good. We're all salespeople. And today is the day we start a new movement at inbound, which is sales pride. Boldly standing up saying, I am proud to be a salesperson, changing the world. Because for too long, the real estate agents and the car guys have given sales a really bad name. And the thing is that we are all able to and requiring to up our game as salespeople and literally change the world. And the thing is, we are all salespeople working at the speed of light these days. So I'm going to ask that question again. Who's the salesperson here? It's everybody. Every single person in this room, every single person on the planet is a salesperson who's a parent. Who was a parent that didn't put their hand up because have you ever tried getting your kids shoes on in the morning, to school, getting them to eat their breakfast on time? All these little things are sales pictures. Who's actually tried to get a job before? All of us. That's a resume creation. That's presenting you on paper. That's an interview process. That's providing information that assists the person wanting to buy you as an employee. We are salespeople all the time. And the reason why sales pride is so important is because it's almost like we're ashamed to admit that, and yet we shouldn't. What's the most valuable commodity the business has? It's the best. Salespeople smashing their targets, making the money. One of the reasons why I have a massive chip on my shoulder about accountants. And did you know that Gary Vee doesn't let his CFO make any decisions? No decisions from the cfo. Because the salespeople make the money. The marketing people help them do that, and the accountants count it with no idea how the first two things happened. And yet the accountants seem to have this power over boards and power over directors that stops from making sensible decisions about sales and marketing. Why is that? So we've got to stand up as sales and marketing people, have our sales pride and make sure that stops. Because we know how to sell stuff. We know it's important. We know marketing is important. And the accountants and the boards and the CEOs stop it with no knowledge. Particularly in the digital revolution. Business at the speed of light is literally at the speed of light. We've now gone from a situation, those Wonderful days of 14,400 board modems screeching away in our ear to fiber optic down every street, streaming everything literally at the speed of light. Glass cables with light pulse down at speed of light. Fiber optics. It's going very, very fast. The Maslow hierarchy of needs. Who's familiar with this? It's all about. It's for a child. The hierarchy of needs. Psychology, safety, security, social needs, esteem, self actualization. I say Maslow schmaszlow. It's about WI fi and it's about power. If you haven't got wi fi and you've never got power, you're a very sad person. Who's nearly out of battery today. Freaking out. Yeah. Who's got their backup battery in their bag, plugged in because they know they've got 10 hours of partying tonight. Yeah. And you talk to me about maslow stuff like self esteem. It's wi fi and battery. That's all it is, guys. So how do you then change? How do you build a modern day sales ecosystem? Normally I like to have these things off the stage. I'll try. How do you build a modern day sales ecosystem? I want to talk now a little bit about the benefits of having been an elite athlete. So I was a pole vaulter. It's that stick thing you run down, stick it to the ground, it goes really bendy and jump over the bar. I think my best would have been about the height of the curtain, 18ft. Thereabouts missed the Olympics narrowly. But athletes are the ultimate salespeople. Why is this so? Why is this so? Because what athletes do is they sell themselves on their ability to make the Olympic Games for four to six years out. Four to six years out. We say I am good enough to make the Olympics. So much so that I will commit every single dollar and waking hour to that crusade. We sell ourselves. We're the ultimate salespeople. So much so that when you look at it already after the days of Brazil and one of the great benefits of being an athlete was I got to see many Olympic gold medalists and train with very many elite athletes and see their operation, their mindset. But ultimately ask yourself the question. And this is where we get a bit of interaction going. Get those pens and laptops out. Just write down, where will you be at the opening ceremony of Tokyo, 24 July 2020. The Olympic Games opening ceremonies are watched by 3 billion odd people. So they're always a really good landmark to remember. Where you're at. And as an Olympian, or as an aspiring Olympian, when you were 12 and 10 years old, that is what triggered you to say, I really want to go to the Olympics. Is there any Olympians in the room? Yeah. It's shitty, isn't it? Would have been good to go. I know how you feel, but you aspire as a young person. You are inspired by what you see on TV. Australia had a 100 metre freestyle gold medalist. He was 18 years old. 18 years old. He was inspired by the Thorpes and Hacketts that won the gold medals in 2004 and 2008. The great Australian swimmers. We're surrounded by water, so you kind of have to be good at swimming or you're screwed. So he said he was going to go to the Olympics and set his dream from 10 years out. So where were you? I want you guys to take one minute to have a quick glass of water. The parties are taking their toll. But think about where are you going to be? What's your goal? Act like an Olympic athlete right now and say, what is Your goal on the 24th of July, 2020? As soon as the Olympic program is announced as an athlete, and I was just recently attempting to coach some beach volleyball girls to Rio, and as soon as the program was announced, we planned out the entire day for every day leading back to the day it was announced, which is three years out. So think about this. I'm going to grab some. What do you guys think? What's your goal? Where are you going to be on the 24th of July when the Tokyo Olympics are the opening shower and beyond? And. And you think of that big, tall red bloke that was crapping on about it at inbound back in 2016. Think about it. What's your goal? How do they plan? How do you plan as an Olympian to be there on that day, on the day when Tokyo begins? You might have written your goal down. You may need some time to think about it. But all they do is they take that date and they work it back and they work out what all their strengths and all their weaknesses are. They work out what they have to fix, they work out what they have to enhance and they go ahead and make effectively a pyramid. So as a pole boulder, I needed to jump 5 meters 60, which is 18 4, I think, so 5 meters 60, 18 4. So that's what I needed to get there. And so you work it back. Where are you going to be the week of the Olympic trials when they're in Australia in March, Then you Work it back. When do you start competing that summer? What do you need to do the year before, touring Europe, etc. And every single date has worked out. That is how Olympic athletes hit their goals. So to help today, I'm going to give you 12 steps. 12 inbound sales ecosystem steps. Hopefully some are memorable, hopefully some trigger change. They may not be things you actually implement, but I just want you to take them away and say, right, if I'm going to think like an Olympic athlete in your business, in your sales business, what sort of things are you going to do to make that happen? What sort of steps should you take? When I preach change to the ecosystem and suggest the old way is broken, it is very broken. That's all well and good, but how do you fix it? How do you fix it? And one of the great problems, of course, is that the management and the sales managers are, and I'm part of this group, trained in what we used to do. And in the 80s and 90s, that's how we cut our teeth as sales people and became worthy of management. And the things we did in the 80s and 90s and the noughties don't work anymore, it's far too different. So we've got to relearn the playbook to be current for our age. Now, number one, help prospects with engaging content. There's a lot of content marketing stories at this magnificent conference and event, but what it really comes down to is making sure that you help your prospects with the content they need to make their decisions, think about. And one of the things as a challenge we have when we're in the consulting phase of customers is I say, we want to say this, this, this on a website. And then I say to them, well, would you look for that stuff on your website? And they go, no. There's a detachment between the business owner and the business marketing teams compared to what the reality of being a customer is all about. Marketing is pretty easy. All you've got to do is have the empathy to think like a client. Think like a customer. Would the customer search who has got price on their website? What's the number one question that people want answered when they go searching for a product or service? How much does it cost? And 15% of the room has got price on the website. So there's the example of the mismatch. Straight away, all the consumers want to know is price. And 15% of the room's got price. So what happens as a consumer if you go to a website and want price and the price isn't there? What do you do? Leave Google again. And where do you stop? You stop when the price is available to you. And if you don't have the price on your website and your competitor does, what website is going to win that battle? The one with the price. Now we hear stories all the time, especially from B2B. Oh yeah, but we can't tell our customers the price. Why not? They say, well, because we've got a pricing structure and we're making commercial fridge doors, we need to do the measurements. Well, in the absence of a number, provide the information that helps him understand why there is an absence of a number. Talk about the reasons why you can't provide the price. Show off your knowledge, your consulting skill and help them along the way to understand why there isn't a price. So help prospects with engaging content and make sure when you're doing, you're thinking about the prospect, not you. Too many businesses want to talk about themselves. It's just like sitting next to that person at a dinner party and all they do is talk about themselves. They're boring. You don't want to be there, you want to change seats. Talking about yourselves is not a place to be in this world. Talk about how you help your customers. Number two, list your customers questions and answer them. The FAQ page on a website is dead. The entire website is an faq. The entire website. Get a single question for a page. Break out those questions. Start by right now taking a Google Doc and start listing all of the questions that a consumer would have about your business, not just the questions that you feel like answering. Putting yourself in the shoes of the consumer means that you will have 200, 300 questions. Every single question. As a salesperson, as a marketing person, every single question you've ever had should be on your website. Because when you think about it, the consumers are on there searching for answers on Google. Whose job is it to provide Google with the answers? Yours. And if you guys don't provide the answers, your competitors will. So take a list of all the questions and answer them. Get the entire organization providing those questions through accounts, the cleaning people, the inventory management people, because they all get questions as well. They're all part of this process. We are all sales people. Three High sales I'm marketing get together. The reason why this is a massive theme and you hear it a lot from a lot of speakers is because when you consider that the consumer is doing at least 70% of their research on the Internet before they speak to a salesperson. Now this used to be the Domain of the salesperson. This used to be what the salesperson used to do with the original understanding conversations. But now with so much content available on the Internet, the consumers are super educated by what's on the website. And the information on the websites is made by the marketing people. So marketing, you need to know the challenges that sales have. You need to understand what things, what questions the sales guys are getting. Because you can't answer the questions if you don't know them. Get the salespeople in the room together. Marketing. Sales work together. Sales. You need marketing to get those questions up. If there's a question you keep getting asked, it becomes a website page. These are the key elements. You have to be unified in this space. And we're all salespeople. And we're all salespeople for one simple reason. Is there any touch point with your organization can result in a consumer launching a scathing attack on one of the many different channels they have available to them? In the old days, all they could do was call up consumer affairs and that wouldn't cost you a single sale. You had a bit of a fight with the government. We had a person next flight working 0.5 of the week on fights with the government, but no damage done to our reputation. And yeah, there's a bit of word of mouth, but if you get a bad touch point with your organization now with social media, you are dealing with an absolute wildfire. It can take off and do more damage than ever. So this is why every person's a salesperson. 4. Your digital assets need to be remarkable. It is incredible seeing how many poor, sloppy. LinkedIn, Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook profiles. There are websites. Did you know the second most hit website pages for our customers are the people pages? The homepage, Yep. Wins it. But it's the people pages that get the next slot. And when you're talking about your profile, talk about all the things that you know that helps the customer. What do you know that helps the customer? It's not about how great you are in your bio and telling the world how impressive you are. It's about all the things you know that help the customers. And your profile pages will be the second most hit. We've got enough websites to know. It's just the way consumers are. They want to. It's not about B2C. It's not about B2B. It's about P2P. It's people to people, people to people. They want to trust you. The information that you give them, they want to trust you for that. So get your assets appropriate. It costs $100 at most to have an amazing profile picture done. It costs you about six months of gym membership to lose your gut and look better. That's hard work, but make sure you time it up so you look great. But the whole bloke around the other bloke picture that's half chopped off. So many people have that. A lot of people don't have photos at all. What are we scared of? We're trying to gain the customers trust. Seeing who you are, knowing who you are is the best way to do that. This is going to be a rant get the IT department out of your sales and marketing department. IT departments, especially in the client server world, they set up systems, they fix your email, but we see them involved in purchasing and deployment decisions about sales and marketing. They have no idea. In today's age, completely dominated by technology, just because you can fix a DNS server or an email issue does not qualify you to be involved at all in the sales and marketing conversation. About automated sales and marketing software, CRM software, software that automates the process of sending sms, all these different technology. Get the IT department out of there. Because there's one or a couple major reasons why it's the IT department is only interested in making sure there's no bugs and issues and viruses they have to deal with. It's self interest all the way. I love IT people. I am one of my copies.