INBOUND 2016: Dawn Poulos "How Sales Teams Should Leverage Data for Strategic Storytelling"

Thank you. So can everyone hear me? Okay, cool. All right. That's loud. Okay, I'm gonna keep my voice down. All right, so I'm Dawn Poulos. I am the vice president of marketing at Mattermark. So for those of you who don't know what Mattermark does, we help VCs and sales teams get their next game changing deal. And we do that using external company data and marketing and market growth signals. And today, and I've been in, I've been For the past 15 years, I've spent in sales and marketing positions in high growth SaaS companies. So I think I've learned a couple of things in that time. So I'm pretty excited to have this opportunity and come talk about these things. So really what I want to focus on today is I want to focus on how to leverage data in sales. And much like we leverage data in marketing to create great companies like HubSpot. So I want to talk about how we can use data to improve prospecting, how we can use data to tell better sales stories, and how we can use data to create a really efficient sales funnel. So I'll talk about. So if you had to get kind of three things from today, there's three things I want you to take away. I want you to get an understanding, even on urgency, of, of how data is really gonna change the sales process. And I want you also to have an understanding that data. Right now we can use data to supplement our BDR sdr, however you call it, your AES and beyond. You can start doing that now. And also hopefully I can give you a little bit of a framework, some suggestions about leveraging data in sales using an icp, marrying that with external company data. Okay? So that's what I'm trying to do. And I'll do my best to get that across. And I'm a pretty informal person, so if you don't like something or you have a question, raise your hand, shout it out. You can tweet something, but try to be nice. But I can take the occasional insult. It's cool. All right, so let me advance. All right, so the story is in the data. So today I want to talk to you about data because that's a huge part of what I do. And I'm not talking about boring, mind numbing data. I'm not talking data scientist kind of stuff or analytics. What I'm talking about is the data that we come in contact with every day. So it's the data that we use to close deals. It's the data that we use to prospect, and it's the data we use to build highly efficient sales funnels. And it's the kind of information that every salesperson should become proficient with if they want to stay. If they want to stay relevant in their organization and they want to drive efficiencies, okay? It's that data that matters. And the reason it matters so much is because we're under more pressure than ever, both in marketing and sales, to deliver. And everyone says that. But let me give you an example. At Mattermark, we work with a lot of. We work both in the VC and the sales realm. And a couple months ago, we had a webinar with Jason Lumpkin. Does everyone know who that is? He's a VC. He's a SaaS authority. And he said something, and he's very opinionated, and he's great. And he said something that really stuck with me. And it stuck with me because it really kind of conveys the sentiment in sales today. He said that if you get a VP of sales, and in 90 days or whatever your sales cycle is, that person cannot increase revenue per lead. He said that person is not a VP of sales. He says it's hopeless. So let me just say that again. You're a new VP of sales. You got exactly one sales cycle to increase revenue per lead, or else you're out the door just as fast as they can get you out of there. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, shit, that's pretty harsh. That's not real. But then you have to think about it. Everything's changed in the past year over the past six to 12 months. It's not about raising money, and it's not about just getting out and throwing money at the wall and. And raising more funds. It's about a race to profitability, okay? And that affects every single team, and it affects sales especially. So every single function in the organization needs to do more with less. And sales especially, okay? So if you think about it, one way to make the most of our out of our activities is using data, okay? And to see how they actually perform. So that's what I'm gonna talk about today. And I'm also gonna talk about how to arm our salespeople with data, okay? Data that allows them. And I'm not talking about turning salespeople into data geeks or crazy quants, because they're never going to do that. I'm really talking about giving them the information they need to create compelling stories about the products that they sell. And that's based on real information. So hopefully you'll come away with an idea or two of how to leverage data for storytelling, because that affects everything that we do, from sales to how customers use our product. Okay, so let's get started here. Okay, so what does everyone think of when they hear the word data? Anything. Quiet. Okay. Drowning in it. Information. I talk to a lot of companies, and I sit on a lot of panels, and I do a lot of talks. And what I hear all the time is that, you know what? This is hard. It's really hard to do. And then I hear all the time, if you look at smaller companies especially, they'll say, you know what? We did this. We bought into this whole data idea. We made the investment, and it's been a complete disaster. And then I also hear on the other end of the spectrum, I hear, you know what? We're too small of a company to even be thinking about that right now. And so I get it. Data's hard. But one thing that I've learned over the years is that you're never really too small to start. You just need to take small steps, and you need to. And you need to find out that data is actually going to be. Once you take those small steps and you start learning and you start growing, data actually becomes your best friend. Okay? So I want everyone to kind of pause and read this for a little bit, because this is really powerful. Okay. Maybe stories are just data with a soul. So let's think about how numbers play into our storytelling. What I love about this is that I think it conveys the ultimate power of data, and that's because it gives you the ability to tell stories that actually resonate with people. And it's because data is grounded in the truth, and data is grounded in human experiences. You can't lie with data. Okay? So the numbers play a huge part in our storytelling. It's the data from which we're really going to create. It's data that's going to help us create compelling product narratives in sales, okay? And that's because data provides the raw material for identifying patterns, and it's patterns about customer behavior. It's patterns about usage. It's patterns about how your product is being leveraged. And this is my version of a funnel. And I got this from John Miller at Engagio. And he doesn't look at a funnel. He looks at the funnel across the whole customer journey. So when you think about it, when you're crafting stories, you're crafting stories for people all over your organization to Tell stories as your customer goes through the entire funnel at different points in time. And the customer journey is long and it has many steps. So from the first time your customer comes in as a visitor to the point where hopefully they're becoming advocates, you want to tell the story at the right time. You want to tell the right story at the right time. And I know everyone says that, but that's really important because they're never ever going to get to that advocacy part unless you're help. Unless. What does it say? Always be helping, always be helping. And that's what happens when you're telling stories through the site, through the sale, through the funnel. Excuse me. And the important thing is also to understand is that as you're doing this and as you're telling those stories, you're collecting data along the way as well. So that's really key. Okay? So data, it's important because it helps you make meaning from the interactions that people have with your business. Every interaction that people have is a piece of data. So if you think about it, this is why we pour over Google Analytics, because we're trying to find out what pages on our website are converting. It's why we're looking at product usage like Mode and Mixpanel. Okay. We're trying to get meaning to fuel our decision making process. The big question is, what's next? What do I do now? You're in a sales cycle. I've had that first demo. I'm not quite sure what to do. So if you listen to Brian Holligan's keynote the other day, what he said is he said that content is king for marketing, but context is king for sales. And so it's data that gives you that context. Okay, but in order to get value out of that data, you can't just have it, you need to know what to do with it. And people and organizations, every team, every function within an organization struggles with this, but no one more so than sales. Okay? So I don't know how many can relate to this, but how many times do you see sales going after the wrong leads? And even worse are any and all leads? And how many times do you see them sitting on calls with people that are not right for their product and that are never going to close? How many people see that? I mean, it happens all the time and it's frustrating. We're in an open office and I hear our sales team and I hear our BDRs and our SDRs and I hear them saying those things and sometimes I want to cringe. But I understand why they're trying to do it, but really, we just have to stick to what we know, the data, and move forward. So let me give you an example. Let's look at this from a practical perspective on how we score leads. So we're all HubSpot customers, and the vast majority of us use HubSpot to score leads. Okay? But if you're like, so someone comes to your website. So if you're not looking at the full realm of data on a website, full realm of data on a prospect, if they come to your. If they. You might be assessing way more significance to an action they take on their website than they actually deserve. So, for example, someone comes to your website, they go to a page. They go to a lot of pages, they open a piece of content they download, they hit a bunch of CTA buttons. You know, a lot of people think that's a really great thing. But that stuff, in and of its. Those actions in and of itself, is not enough to dictate how much time you spend with a prospect. But we do it all the time. We lead score completely on those interactions. But you have to think about it. What if that person who came to your website and did all of that really great stuff that seems great to you comes from a company that, well, they haven't had funding in three or four years, or they had a down round, or they haven't had a lot of employee growth in the past 12 to 18 months? Those factors involved. You may not want to spend that much time with a customer if you knew that. But people do it all the time. Salespeople sit with bad leads all the time. And this sucks. And it sucks so bad because that's the top of the funnel, right? So you start talking with really bad prospects at the top of the funnel, people who are never gonna close, and somehow you get them through a prolonged sales cycle, you are creating inefficiencies all the way through your sales funnel. Okay? So, boom, the buyer's journey has changed. You've heard this a million times. It's true. Okay, so for years, and this is, sales teams have been lauded by their innate ability to hook a buyer or seller and sell them on a product, or hook a buyer, hook a prospect, hook them on a. Hook them on a product, and close them through some innate finesse, some innate intangible ability. But these days, the buyer's journey has changed, and the way we sell needs to change as well. Especially in SaaS, where the payback period is so very important. It's no Longer, just about closing. Okay. It's about responding to an informed buyer. These guys have a lot of information. When they come to you, you have to be able to respond and interpreting a wealth of data to understand when to reach out. So you have to reach out with the right person at the right time. And salespeople need to. Salespeople need to provide value, to stay relevant, always be helping. You know, we changed it. Used to be at Mattermark, what we did was early on, we were always trying to get our BDRs to get a meeting with the AES as soon as possible. How many people do that? Never. Nobody. No one's BDRs try to get an appointment, you know, but we actually changed that. We said, you know what, if you're always. If your goal is, is just to get a meeting, that's not always. That's always a closing mentality. We change it to, you know what, you need to help them through this trial and you need to help them be successful with our product. And we change it to kind of an always be helping mentality. Because we need salespeople. We want them to stay relevant. And they do that with data that they collect, both internally as well as company data. So it's all well and good to pour over Google Analytics, but you have to know, it's not enough to know that your prospect is engaged with your content. You have to know right away if they're a right fit for your product. Okay, so, but here's the catch. Even though salespeople say that data is really important for them, they can't get their hands on it. Everyone says this, I can't get my hands on data. So this is a survey taken of 400 sales leaders, directors, and they said, they all said the same thing, 96% of them, content is critical, or data is critical to my sales process. But the weird thing is 65% of them said they can't get their hand on data. They can't get their hands on data in order to close a sale or be able to take action. They say, you know what, the content's too siloed, or my company's not thinking enough about leveraging data to optimize sales, or we're just growing too fast. You hear that all the time. But there's gotta be practical ways to get data in the hands of salespeople. So let's talk about that a little bit. Oops, sorry, there's a 65 I forgot to advance. Okay, so there's two types of data that we can get into the hands of salespeople, okay? There's internal data. It's the kind of data that tells you about your best customers. That's internal data, okay? And then there's a second kind of data that people don't think about too much. And that's the kind of data that helps you find customers exactly like your best, your VIP customers. And that's company and growth data. So when you have access to both of these types of information, my best customers and the customers that look like them, you have both sides of the equation, okay? And that lets you prospect better and better predict the outcome of business opportunities. Okay? So what that does is that lets you, sales teams say goodbye to this spray and pray thing. I hate that so much. In so many ways, I hate it, okay? Because you really want to create an efficient funnel. You only want to talk to those people who share the characteristics of your best customer, okay? And even the most sale, even the most advanced sales teams, a lot of these high growth sales teams who are doing these things, they can leverage efficiency as well. Mattermark has a customer called Looker. Super high growth, totally killing it in the marketplace. And they really buy into this idea that, you know what, I need both sides of the equation. I need the internal and external data. And so they have their SDRs, their SDR team going out and doing that and saying, you know what, make sure you understand a prospect before you go and do it. So they were checking their website, they were going into LinkedIn, they were doing Google searches. And what they found is that it took them five minutes to research a prospect before they called. If you're an SDR and you've got a lot of calls to make during the day, that's a lot of time. And what they did was they said, you know what, I'm going to consolidate my external data just like I consolidate my internal data and not make them go all overboard. So through tools like Mattermark and other things where that data provides them, they get it all in one place for them. And five minutes all of a sudden went down to 30 seconds. And that's a big deal. When you take that big savings and you multiply it by the number of leads they have to get a day, the number of SDRs on your team, the number of hours they spend a week, that's a significant increase in efficiency. And for Looker, it was to the tune of 30% increase in qualified accounts, again, getting more revenue per lead. And you have to do that with both the internal and the external. Okay? So you're going to hear a lot about the lookers of the world while you're here, because this is HubSpot inbound and everyone's talking about how great they are. Okay? So you're going to hear a lot of that stuff. But for all the new initiatives out there, there's still this kind of magical myth of the super salesman who's super charismatic and is going to close a deal in one call. Okay? And we're still selling like we sold 20 years ago. The quote is true up here, but I'm here to tell you, you need to. Sales people need to start using data. They need to start using data to develop compelling narratives about the value of their product and why it's valuable to prospects. This is really important. It's not about you, it's about the customer. And when you start doing that, you're gonna focus on only those accounts that really wanna. That are really right for you. And a hint is it's not going to be everybody. And that's great because you don't want to talk to everybody. You don't want to talk to people who don't have any chance of having a fit with your product. And so now I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how to do that. Okay? I think I said this already. Start with your best customers. Customers are king. Customers are everything. And when you have a product and, and whatever state that product is in the moment, if you're doing your best work, there are customers who find value out of that. So whether that's 10 customers, 100, 1,000, 10,000. Find those customers and then dig deep into your internal data, okay. And identify the customers who are driving the most revenue. Identify the customers who have the potential to drive the most revenue. Identify the customers who are using your product the most. Okay. When you find that group of customers, ask yourself what attributes define them? Okay. What are the attributes that define those customers? What industry are they in? That's a typical thing. At what point in time did they decide that they needed to buy our product? Was it when they were a certain employee size? When they got funding? Whenever? Okay. What problem are they trying to solve? What job are they trying to get done with our product? And so if you're analyzing your internal data properly, okay, you're gonna be able to develop what I call an icp Ideal Customer Profile. How many use those? Okay. So this is really important. The most important thing that you can develop if you're analyzing your internal data properly is you're gonna, you know, this is gonna become vital to your sales process, the icp. So let's talk about that a little bit. Okay? So with a clear ICP in hand, your sales teams have what they have. They've just improved their prospecting with the help of data. Okay? So prospecting no longer becomes a volume game, it becomes a data game. And they have that blueprint in your hand. So again, they're not going to be wasting time on accounts that are unlikely to find success with their products. They're going to be spending time with accounts that have the same exact characteristics as their best customers. And think about it, if you're in sales, who wants to talk about, you know, who wants to go and talk about something that they're not comfortable talking about? You want to talk about your best customers and you want to find those people who that resonates with. And it's not going to resonate with everybody, but we tend to think it does. So let's talk about what goes into an icp. Okay, so most people do some level of icp, ideal customer profile, and they do it through Personas. How many people do Personas? Okay, so you are doing some icp. And so if you look, if you, you know, we're going to go back and we're going to talk about the different sides of the equation again. So if you look at traditional ICPs and the Personas, it's usually that demographic role and pain point. That's one side of the equation, right? That's your typical Persona. But you now start to need to bring in the other side of the equation. You need to start bringing in growth data. You know, you need to start bringing in company data, growth funding, employee count. And so what this does is this gives you a much more complete picture of what your ideal customer profile looks like. Because again, going back to the lead scoring, you can't have partial pictures of things. You can't do things on small slices of data. You're not going to get the answers you need. Okay? So when you start, and this is really awesome, and because now not only do you have a complete picture, but because you've taken the time to understand your customers, pain points and the job to be done, it now becomes really easy to craft a story about your product that prospects find compelling. Okay. And once you understand how you provide value to your product, sticking to the storyline becomes really easy. You know, that's the hard part for salespeople, sticking to the storyline. And you can do that in prospecting. You can do that when you're jumping on a Sales call. And you can do that when you're strategically planning for future sales activities. So sales teams all the time. And I'm not ripping on sales teams. I want everyone to know this because I was in sales, I started in sales, and I love sales, and I now work with our BDR team now. So sales is great. So when I say sales do bad things, I am that person who did all those bad things and still do all those bad things. And now I do it in marketing too. So it's double whammy. So if you look in the. If you look at the sales. So salespeople try to do too much. And I want to give you an example of that. Everyone uses Slack, Hipchat, whatever in their organization. And you come through and your slack channel comes to your sales enablement or it goes to your product marketing. And they have a question, and it's a sales guy. He's like, oh, my God, I'm on the phone with this, really with this super hot prospect. And they just need to know if we do this and this feature and then another one comes through, oh, my God, this is great. They want to buy right now. We just want to squeeze it into this use case, right? If we can do it like this, we can get that deal. She's going to buy right now. And that happens all the time. But if you start thinking about if that's the way you work and you're trying to do too much, it's not going to work out well. Okay. How many people measure their conversion rates all the way through the funnel? Okay, so you need to do that obviously in the aging, but if you're watching your conversion rates and they're low, if your conversion rates are low, you can be pretty sure it's because assuming you have product market fit, and that's not an issue, you can be pretty sure it's assuming because when we're going out there and we're selling and we're marketing, we're not sticking to our strengths and we're not following our icp because our icp, it's a blueprint, okay? It's a blueprint that makes it so much easier to find prospects that are worth the investment, worth the additional investment of time and resources. Sales is a lot of time and resources, and not everyone deserves those times and resources. Only the ones who are going to buy into your product. And they're only going to buy into your product if you know who they are. And you're only going to know who they are if you spend the Time to develop an icp. An ICP is so important. Okay, so let's see. Reaching out at the right time. Okay, again, I'm going to go back. Magical finessed salesperson who can sell anything based on some level of methodology and close the deal right there. It's not true. It doesn't work like that. And I cannot, you know, as I keep saying that, I think of salespeople in the past who I thought were so awesome and could do all of that stuff. Stuff. It's BS because people have a lot of information. They're armed with information right now. They're smart and you can't expect to just go to them. And it's going to close in a predictable manner. It's not going to happen like that. The way things happen in a predictable manner is being able to interpret data and knowing when to reach out. And that's how you get a level of predictability. So you have to look at the best time. What is the data telling me? When are they telling me to reach out and should I reach out not only to a customer, but when is the best time to reach, I mean to a prospect, but when is the best time to reach out to an existing customer for an upsell? Okay, so those are the things you need to look about, look at. That's what's going to bring predictability to your sales process. Okay, so let's go back to the ICP really quick because I'm going to talk about this now. Further. Your ICP gives you the power to do two things. It understands. It helps you understand which customers are having success with your product. And it helps you determine how to find other customers. It helps you determine to find other prospects that look exactly like them. Okay, so this is powerful stuff. It means that your sales teams now have the ability to have meaningful conversations with prospects and prospects that are going to buy into it and at the right time. So it's really important. Okay, so what I want to look at now is so the ICP is actually only one part of it. So we talked about those two. I keep talking about two halves of the equation here. So I want to talk about being able to marry your ICP with external company data sources and what that looks like. Because if you've gone through the whole, if you've gone through all of this trouble you to understand what the attributes of your best customer look like, then there's gotta be a way to find more just like them. And that comes from marrying that internal data with external customer data. So I'm gonna give you a small example right here, okay? This is a blowup. It's a piece of data from Mattermark and Looker. I talked about Looker earlier. They're one of our best customers. We got them about 18 months ago. As they grow, we grow because we upsell them, right? So it's great. I love Looker. They're successful, we're successful, we make a lot of money, and I want to find more just like them, okay? So I'm going to go into my external source and I'm going to say, well, what do I like about Looker? Well, I like that they're fast growing. So give me companies that have. Give me companies where they're growing fast and employee growth has gone, whatever, up 25% in the past six months. Give me someone in enterprise software who has a B2B business model, okay? I also know that I have the best luck with these types of firms when they're at series C, okay? So now all of a sudden, I can go out and I can find customers that look exactly like their little lookers, right? And I can catch them at the same time I caught Looker or even before. And that's really, really important because you want to find those baby, you know, those little lookers, the look alikes, okay? And so again, spray and pray goes away, and you get to be vastly more strategic with your outreach and talking to those. Those accounts that are most likely to convert, okay? So a really funny thing happens when you start to identify sales targets based on the actual narratives that you go through that you get through data. It. It's much easier for sales teams to find and sell to customers who are gonna buy their product. Okay? So, for example, at Mattermark, our sales strategy is based on our internal icp, okay? And we know who does really well with our product. And our sales org uses this as a guide. And we sell both to sales and marketing. But we're very, very specific about our use cases. We know that there are only a few use cases that work really well. And that means instead of jumping on calls with unqualified leads, we only talk to the sales and marketing leads that will work with our product. And so this is not only for outreach. Let me tell you another thing that we do with Mattermark data. We talked about lead scoring earlier and talked about behavioral data. So we mix. We marry behavioral data with this external company data. So when a lead score comes in, they get points for interacting with our content, but they get even more points if they're a good prospect. Or they're growing or they have funding. Okay? So we need to make sure that we reach out at the right time so that the message that we're sending makes sense to them. Okay? So for example, for Mattermark, we know that when a customer hits about the 25 person stage or 15 or 20 person stage, they're ready for our basic plan. We know that when they hit another stage that they're ready for another plan. We know that when they hit Series B funding, they're probably going to do that. They're probably going to start buying sales tools, okay? And so we're going to go after them. And we know this because we know the data and we can be the first to reach out. And that's really important. Let me keep going on this. I love this. This is Slack and this is their, the blue line is the growth and the green bars are their employees. And there's a lot of examples. And this is kind of like a little. And there's a lot of examples of this working about reaching out and upselling customers at the right time. So, for example, if we know customers are going to go out and get a round of funding, we want to be able to go out and talk to them before anybody else. So if you look at this, if you're, you know, if you were with, if you were at Slack and you were where it says sell here, if you were a vendor or even better, a venture capitalist like Social Capital, who got in at that point, you, you're getting a great windfall right now from the $4.8 billion valuation they have right now. And the really interesting thing there is when they were experiencing all that growth, they weren't experiencing it with just employees. So their employees were really low, but their volume was super high and their revenue was going up really quickly. And if you were able to understand those market signals, you were able as a vendor to go in and sell to them. And if you were a really smart venture capitalist, you were able to go ahead and invest in them. And I'll give you an example again internally of reaching out at the right time. So I came to matter, Mark, right before they got their Series B and I was brought in to scale the marketing operations, our CEO, the executive team knew they were going to get their next round of funding. So I came in and it was about four weeks before they made the announcement that they got their Series B. And I was getting it, you know, learning things and getting online. And about 15 to 20 vendors reached out to me. And so I engaged with about half of them, because it was early on in my days and it was a really good time as I was trying to investigate things. And I engaged with about half of them. And probably within the next four months, I signed maybe two contracts. So four weeks come, four weeks later, the announcement goes out, the press release, and all of a sudden I get inundated. Congratulations on your funding. You should use our product. Right? And I get about 200 of those a day. And I'm sure there were really great things that I could have bought, you know, that I could have looked into, but I was too busy. I couldn't take. I couldn't manage 200 emails a day. So it talks about reaching out at the right time. Those people reached out really at the wrong time to me because it was too late. But the vendors who got in and could understand that, hey, she's new, they're close to getting around to funding, contacted me and I engaged with them. Right time, right message. Okay. And so what happens, you have to start thinking about this. And now things start to get from. We talked about those baby steps. You're understanding data, you're understanding kind of growth scores, and now you're starting to use it in a predictive manner. You're starting to understand when your prospects might be going out and get funding and you're starting to run analysis or you're understanding, you know, level of employee growth and upselling and things like that. So this is the, this, this is the data. This is when data becomes more predictive. And this is really just the beginning of the transformation we're starting to see with data in the sales space. Does anyone use predictive type stuff yet? No. Okay, so that proves my point. So, but that's the predictive stuff. Like I said, I love it so much because now we're starting to really dig into our data. Before again, we were kind of. We started out with the lead scoring and we started doing that data and we started putting it in there. We're just saying, okay, these are good leads. And we really increased the quality of what we did because we were doing both halves of that equation. And now we're also starting. And you know, we're a small company too, and we're taking baby steps and we're learning about all of this. And now we're starting to try to look into this predictive type of, this predictive type of work. So the last point I want to make before we kind of end this is digging into your ICPs. Okay. When you spend time building an ideal customer profile, you're going to be really challenged to dig deep inside your prospect's industry and their way of doing business. And that's really important. And the pain points become your own, and you start to align their pain points with the stories that you tell about your product and the value it provides. And this is where the crossover happens. This is where the intersection with data and content happens. Your data helps you understand your prospects and customers. Customers. And in turn, you create narratives. You create stories with soul. Okay? And this changes your business, and it changes the way you sell. And I believe that this is the way that we need to go with data. And I'm going to end with that. Thank you, everybody.