INBOUND 2016: Jill Rowley - "One Team, One Goal"

Thank you. Slight correction. I'm actually a sales professional trapped in a marketer's body. Reason being, I was on quota for 52 quarters. 13 years at Salesforce and at Eloqua for 10 of those years. My buyer was marketing. Who in the room is in marketing? Okay, who in the room is in sales? Awesome. All right, good. It doesn't matter that I'm a sales professional trapped in a marketer's body or marketer trapped in a sales professional's body, because the reality is the lines between sales and marketing are blurring and the roles are blending. And your customer doesn't really care if you're in marketing or in sales. Your customer cares about the value that you can deliver to the customer. So we're going to talk today about a little bit more expanding on Brian's keynote. Who was in Brian's keynote? Yeah, I couldn't have asked for better timing for this session because it absolutely builds on what Brian set up in the keynote. The modern buyer, she is digitally driven. And he said, people don't say, hey, Bing. That they say, google it. Anyone from Microsoft in the room? Okay, so we can talk about Google being my best friend. Buyers are digitally driven. They're socially connected. Who in the room has checked at least one of their social networks today? Who in the room hasn't? That's pretty telling. You've got one guy. Your mobile phone's broken. No. Couldn't get on the Internet. No. He was engaged. It's awesome. One out of however many hundreds in here, mobile with multiple devices, empowered with nearly unlimited access to not only information, but to people, their peers, their colleagues. And if we listen to what Brian said about who buyers trust, it's their peers, their colleagues. So I'll start out by saying your best salespeople are not on your payroll. Your best salespeople are your customers who are getting value and are willing to advocate on your behalf a little bit more about buying. This was a survey done recently, and I got this data from a Forrester event that I attended a couple weeks ago. Around sales enablement and B2B marketing. I find gathering information online on my own superior to interacting with a Sales Rep. In 2015, 53% answered yes. In 2016, 64% answered yes. Let's ask the question slightly differently. I do my research online and prefer not to interact with a sales rep as my primary source of research. In 2015, 59% yes. In 2016, 65% yes. Buyers are allergic to salespeople. Not really to salespeople, but they're allergic to being sold. And so they would rather self educate on their own time as opposed to be harassed with unsolicited emails or generic cold calls. 93% of B2B buyers prefer to buy online when they've decided what they want oftentimes. You know, as a, as a consumer buyer, I go to the store just to try on the size of shoes and then I google it and I find the best price and I buy that pair of shoes online. Anyone else doing that as well? Yeah, here's the thing. I wrote a post about this recently. Buyers either want a frictionless or low friction transaction or they want a high value interaction. Unfortunately, the middle, where a lot of people are operating in high friction, low value transactions, what I refer to as no man's land is where a lot of people are operating, a lot of sales professionals are operating in that no man's land. This isn't my opinion, this is what buyers are telling us. We talked about the lines blurring and the roles blending. And so what I'm not gonna do is give you a presentation that I would have delivered three years ago which would have been all about marketing and sales getting in the room and agreeing on the definition of a qualified lead, on agreeing on the lead score based on whether the person was a VP title, whether they were in retail or health care, whether they were in a big company, a medium company, a small company, so that demographic fit. And then the other component of the lead score being based on their digital body language, their online engagement, whether they had downloaded a white paper, attended a webinar, looked at an infographic, watched a video, that digital body language. So I'm not going to talk about marketing and sales needing to agree upon a common definition of a qualified lead and a perfect handoff from marketing to sales and a service level agreement of how quickly sales will respond to those qualified leads. Because that's not the way that buying is working anymore. And what we really need to get comfortable with is that marketing now needs to know more about sales. And I gotta give it to you marketers in the room, your lives have gotten more complicated. You own more of the purchase process. You have to facilitate that buyer's journey for a longer portion of that buyer's journey. You have to do that in more channels. You have to also then you're responsible for the customer experience. And so your responsibilities, your roles, your channels have increased, but your compensation hasn't. And I think that needs to change. I think also another thing that needs to change is what Brian was talking about about compensation plans for sales professionals instead of just focusing on paying for the close compensating based on customer advocacy. And HubSpot was one of the first companies that actually took that leap and and said we're going to pay salespeople with higher customer renewal and upsell and advocacy more than we pay salespeople with average customer renewal and advocacy. That's what modern sales leaders need to be thinking about. We need to compensate the behavior that we want to see. Sales needs to know more about marketing. So a lot of salespeople I've been trained for years on sales methodology and sales process, about how to conduct a discovery call, about how to handle objections, around how to position us and differentiate us from our competitors. But what about buyer Personas? Who is our ideal customer profile? Who are our best fit accounts? Who are the people within those companies that are the best roles for what we sell? How do they buy? What does that buyer's journey look like? What kinds of content they consume along the buyer's journey? That sales people need to understand that. Marketing knows that sales needs to understand that. And at the end of the day, because we live in a world where the buyer has the power, buyers have more choice and they also have louder voice. It's no longer word of mouth, it's world of mouth. Social networks don't know geographic boundaries, they don't know time zones, they don't care. So buyers have a lot more power than they used to. And we need to understand more about our customers, more information from research. B2B buyers want a sales rep that integrates customized data and insights, helps them learn something new, shows how their product or service impacts that company's business or that person's role within the business. And also prior to meeting really has done their research and understands that customer. So B2B buyers want a different level of service and engagement from the B2B sales professional. We need to think about the competencies and capabilities of the modern day sales professional. She needs to be more tech savvy. She needs to be more data driven. She needs to be more curious. She needs to have more business acumen, subject matter expertise around her buyer's world. She also needs to be digitally driven and socially connected. She needs to be where her buyers are. The old sales model pounce and pitch, smile and dial, call, email call, email call, email call, email buyers going ignore, delete, ignore, delete, ignore, delete, ignore, delete. We have to evolve that model. And the new model puts the customer in the center and says where is that customer Learning. And that modern day sales professional says I need to go be where those customers are learning and I need to provide insight and value. It's all about reaching and teaching and it's about educating and engaging. Nobody wants to be sold, but everyone's open to help. Brian says, abh, always be helping. I say let's just redefine ABC from always be closing to always be connecting. Coffee's for connectors. Let me define social selling. It's using social networks, not social media. A lot of times companies who say, oh yeah, we need to do this thing called social selling, they get their marketing team to spin up a lunch and learn a workshop at sales kickoff, a webcast and marketing goes and they tell salespeople all about social media. Social media to salespeople, it's confusing, it's chaotic, it's noisy, it's unfiltered, it's the wild, wild west of the world wide web. It's a bunch of noise. Social media to them is more about reach. But social networks, social networks that layer on someone's identity, who they are, where they went to school, where they've worked, what their skills are, someone's relationships to whom they're connected, any mutual connections, who they follow on Twitter, what groups they're a member of and their interest, political or otherwise. Social networks are about relationships and that is what sales is all about. It's about earning someone's trust, establishing credibility and being relevant. And so these networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, sales professionals use them to do research on their buyers, to be relevant to their buyers, to build relationships with their buyers that ultimately drive revenue from their buyers. Social selling isn't about number of followers, retweets, clicks or shares or comments or favorites or likes. It's really about number of meetings and opportunities in the pipeline and deals that are influenced and sourced and closed. Social is an incremental channel for sales professionals. The five pillars, practices, principles. I'm not going to go through all five of these. The one we're going to focus on today because it's really the connection, the primary connection between marketing and sales, which was what we're talking about. Aligning or unifying is content. What I teach salespeople how to do is read what their buyers read and share that content across their social networks. Not just reading, but listening. I go to the gym and I listen to podcasts. And the quality of a podcast can be measured by the number of tweets that I send, the sound bites, the key insights from that podcast. It might be they're interviewing the head of marketing at a B2B company I'm trying to get into. And so I listen to that podcast and I hear what that B2B marketer has to say and I share that podcast. First it gets the attention of that B2B marketer who was interviewed and then it's a source of insight and information for people who are following me and my networks. So content in the context of relationships, not necessarily reach. So, so what we're talking about today is content in the context of sales. It's a bit different than content in the context of marketing. The content needs to be much more buyer centric and much more about the buyer than about the company, the product, the features. But first let me do make sure I beep, beep, beep, back up the bus and say before your salespeople get out there and share content, they need to think about their digital presence. So marketing can help with that, right? If you look at my LinkedIn profile, one of the companies I'm on the board of directors of is a company called Affineo. And Affineo, we do great stuff, we've got great software, it's all about audience intelligence and social graph insights and marketing analytics. But I don't have videos of us talking about our product. The videos, the rich media I Linked on my LinkedIn profile are customer interviews, customer stories, Affinio customer stories. Because who do buyers trust? Other buyers. So thinking about marketing, how can you help salespeople improve their digital presence? You guys are best equipped to help salespeople with this and salespeople. Your network is your net worth. Your network is your net worth. So ABC always be connecting not with everyone, but a rhythm and a routine. Today, this week, as you trade business cards. Those are new people to connect with on LinkedIn. There are also new people to follow on Twitter and once you get to the appropriate level, maybe friend on Facebook or snap with on Snapchat. All right. Content is the currency of the modern sales professional. A research report from Aberdeen shows that content provides the common denominator for what we're talking about today, which is well aligned marketing and sales teams. Best in class companies. 73% of best in class companies have a central library of marketing approved content that sales can use. A centralized library. Best in class 60% marketing has extensive visibility into the utilization of that content. And 40% marketing has extensive visibility into how that content consumption is at an individual person level or a company level. So if you're tracking buyers, digital body language, their online activity, making that online Activity visible to salespeople so that they know how many times people are coming to your web properties, what content they're viewing that aligns marketing and sales. And that is what best in class companies are doing. The four one, one on content. So if all, and I see this, this mistake happen a lot, you buy into the content, you want to get as much content distribution as you possibly can. And so you invest in a platform and you load up this content into this platform and you have salespeople authenticate their social logins, their networks and marketing automates the curation of the content and it automates the sharing of the content from those salespeople. That is not what I'm talking about. That's just more, that's more content, more automation. And more is not more better? No, that's not grammatically correct. More relevant is more better. But more is not more better. What we really have to do is we have to teach salespeople how to, how to either curate on their own or you can curate marketing can curate the content for the salespeople, but that content needs to be a good mix. And so the 411 is a guidance of if you have six shares, four pieces of third party thought leadership, non company branded content. So think about who are the smarty pants people in your buyer's world? Who are the analysts, the experts, the consultants, the influencers in your buyer's world and how can you share non company branded content? One piece of company branded content. And then I so love that there were cat videos and cat pictures in Brian and Dharmesh's keynote because who doesn't love them? So one cat picture. And in my instance it's more like it's things that humanize me as an individual, things that I care about outside of social selling, modern marketing, sales enablement, et cetera. And so those are TED talks. Simon Sinek spoke, I think last year or two years ago. This is my third inbound. Who in the room has been to more than three inbounds? Yes. Who are you, sir? Who are you? Ramon from Mexico. Mexico, Congratulations. All the way from Mexico. That's awesome. So there's other kinds of content that show who you're interested in. Simon talks about starting with the why before you tell someone what they need to do and how they need to do it. They need to understand why they need to do it. We're motivated more by the why than the what and the how. So let's talk about the kinds of content that I would watch and read and share and listen to if I was selling into sales. So SBI Sales Benchmark Index. They produce, they actually have an app and that was this is a useful app and the app aggregates their magazine. They actually publish a physical magazine. I still love like I don't read a book if it's not in print and I highlight it still and I dog ear it and I'm just looking for the tweets in the book. So when I'm on a plane you might notice or a magazine I, I might be reading offline and then queuing up some of the tweets. And when I get off, a couple of the tweets shoot out at the same time. But you are what you eat and you are what you tweet. So I like to tweet and I share this kind of content. Sales Benchmark Index has some great sales leadership content. I talk a lot about social selling. I attended the LinkedIn's annual event in New York a couple months ago and they recorded all of that content. And so I can go back and I can rewatch or re listen, but I can then share that content. So I'm speaking with someone, a big company who's trying to implement a social selling program. They're like, what other big companies have gone down this path? There's a video of IBM's presentation of how they've deployed social selling at scale. If they're like, I'm a mid sized company and I want to implement social selling, who else has done this? There's a video of Qualtrics. So I know that this content exists and then I share this content with my buyers. I'm really trying to be a content concierge, an information concierge. I have to be a content connoisseur to be a content information concierge. Did anyone follow that? Have I lost anyone? Okay, good. So there's tons of great content sales for life. In fact, I just announced that I've joined them as an advisor and a partner. And the CEO was here at Inbound earlier today speaking. He wrote this book called Social Selling Mastery. And this is literally a blueprint for social selling both at an organizational level and at an individual level. And it also talks about marketing's role in social selling and the role of, of change management and so forth. So I could share that content across my social network if I'm selling into marketing. Great resources HubSpot's blog content marketing Institute but if my buyer is marketing, I need to understand my buyer. So I'm constantly consuming that kind of content and Then if I'm selling into it. CxOTalk is a great resource as well. He interviews lots of awesome leaders who are driving digital transformation within their organizations. So let's talk about content as it relates to sales and to your buyers. There are four simple rules of engagement. We've beaten this one, but it's really important. Again, people trust friends, families and peers over logos and sales professionals. Personalization makes a big impression and video is absolutely. You're going to see who in the room is bought into video. Yeah. So video from a marketing perspective. There's a company called Vidyard and not only do they track video and integrate that tracking of video view into your CRM data and your marketing automation data, they do personalized video. So you can take one holiday video or one event video and you can personalize the video for 10,000 or a million people. It's like mail merge for video. So like in a holiday video, there might be a tree with a present underneath the tree and the present says Jill Rowley. That's pretty cool. Or there might be an event video and it has the keynote stage and it's panning the audience and there's Jill Rowley in the audience. It's wicked. Personalized mail merge for video. And now what they've done is they come out with a really easy browser based tool for salespeople to quickly hit a button and record a quick video that then is dropped into an email with the video image in the email and that it's just, I'm telling you, video is absolutely going to be a channel and personalized video. Even better. Vidyard V I D Y A R D and they're in the exhibitor expo here today. People refer dialogues to monologues. I think that's pretty obvious. I think a lot of times I've actually stopped following brands in social because all I got was a monologue. All I got was content about them and never any engagement. And so I actually use social as a channel to engage, not just to be marketed to. And, and so that dialogue is really important. And then sales from a content perspective, think about the kind of content that they need for building relationships. So a couple examples. Curate content from experts, customize it, create conversation and support sales. The cultivating content with a human voice, an example is optimizely. They have a blog that they actually invite their customers to publish on. Hearing the voice. Bless you. Hearing the voice of your customer and having your customers share their stories. When I was a rep at Eloqua, I would spend a lot of time in our community site with our existing customers who were talking about the issues that they had and the success. And I would leverage that content to understand what that customer journey looked like so that I wasn't just pitching product, I was focusing on life after you signed the contract. And so having that human story and your customers, your partners, contribute to your content strategy is a really good idea. Twitter lists. So think about that. Those smarty pants people in your buyer's world who they already respect and trust. I work with a company that's in industrial Internet of things, so I Iot. And so there's lots of smarty pants people in the industrial IoT space. And so I've created a Twitter list of the smarty pants people in the industrial IoT space. And I use that Twitter list to find content about industrial IoT. So I use this Twitter list. Salespeople can, you can create Twitter lists for them and then they can share content from the smarty pants people in a specific. Maybe it's a geography, maybe it's an industry, a subject matter, et cetera, customizing content for the account. This is probably one of my favorite areas. This is the new president of Sprint Enterprise. And when we were preparing for a meeting with Yan, the research that we did on Yan was about Yan. So we found quite a number of video interviews that Jan had done and he said we need to create innovation, retain talent and deliver better experience for our customers. We must get closer to the business of our customers. We need to connect close to them. We need to understand their priorities and challenges. This was the first slide in our deck. When we presented to Sprint, it wasn't about us and our logo slide, it was about Sprint and what their new president thought. Talk about capturing someone's attention, right? One of the things that's really stuck with me and I've had to learn to get better at over time to be interesting, you must be interested in something other than yourself. You don't want to lead with you, your company, your product. You want to lead people to you, your company, your product. And the way that you attract people is by having it be about them and not about you. Really important from a content perspective. These are two more examples of companies and people that I've personally tried to build relationships with and going out to the web, to these social networks, going out to podcasts and video channels and finding information. This is Scott Tapp. He was interviewed on SBI's TV program. And so I shared that link to that video interview on my LinkedIn and tagged Scott Tapping When Scott likes something about social, and this is something that maybe not intuitively sales necessarily understands because they're maybe not as familiar with social, but there's the multiplier effect in social. So if I share a piece of content and tag Scott and Scott likes or comments on the content. Now that appears in everybody who's connected to Scott's feed. And then let's say it's Jason who then comments or likes it, then that appears in everybody's stream that Jason is connected to. The multiplier effect is massive in social. I could find out things like Scott was in the Navy. My dad was in the Navy. That's a point of commonality that he and I have that I can build off of our building a relationship on. I found out that he took an Uber in 2011. That's a signal that he's an early adopter. I can have a different level of conversation with him. Ge this is a very. This is an example of a pretty high touch. But you know Beth Comstock, she's amazing, brilliant leader. Anytime she sends a tweet, I'm notified in real time. She's that important to me. The relationship with GE and with Beth is that important. And she had sent a tweet about learning how to code. And I had just seen a promotion for OSMO teaching kids how to code. And so I actually went online. It was 75 bucks to buy her the Cosmo game. I had the game shipped to her office and when she opened the game and received it, she took a picture of it and she tweeted it. That's, that's. You're going to hear a lot about inbound and we're starting to hear a lot about account based marketing. Is anyone familiar with account based marketing? Account based sales development. It's not exclusive, it's not inbound or outbound. It's all bound. It's inbound, outbound, all bound. And so you're going to start to hear about account based sales development and marketing. This is an example of my ideal customer is big enterprise. My ideal person within that is cmo innovation, growth. And so anytime Beth sends a tweet, I want to be notified. And so I can engage with her content. I can know where she is and what she cares about. I share content across my social networks that GE has actually generated. I share their content and I tag them in that content. I want them to know that I'm doing my research about them and that I understand them. Knowthybuyer. Really important to know Your customer, customer acumen needs to improve and increase and marketing and sales can work together on that. Orchestrating the business conversation. Juniper's done a really nice job of developing a web property that kind of walks through what a typical buyer's journey would look like in terms of kinds of questions the buyer would have. And they collect this information and then they share this information with a sales professional. So the sales professional knows that this information is being gathered and they can use the information that's being gathered to position what it is they're offering to the actual buyer. So orchestrating more of a conversation, collecting that data, that web activity, and making that information available to salespeople really important. Help the messenger deliver your message. This is where we go back to organizing the content in the room. I guess is a number of you are familiar with that marketing technology landscape infographic diagram. Can I see any hands in the room? Scott Brinker, he's been building it a number. If you haven't seen it, it'll make you throw up because it just shows how complicated the world of marketing has become and how much technology has entered into the world of the marketer. When I was at Eloqua, let's just go back to 2011, there were 150 technologies on this diagram. Fast forward to 2016 and there are almost 4,000, 4,000 fricking tools for marketing to filter through. And that's like, do you know how many salespeople are calling you to try to sell you technology? Right? Yeah, yeah. And now they have the ability to automate a sequence of emails. And like the third email is like, why haven't you responded? I've emailed you three times. Have you been, you know, did it, did hippopotamus sit on top of you and trap you? Like they're like getting mad at me. I don't have any obligation to respond to your automated, generic, ridiculously selfish, self serving emails. Right. If you're not going to take the time to understand me and what I care about and how you can help me, I don't want your email. So organizing content that actually is useful, helpful, handy to the buyer, organizing it in a central library, we're going to see very much like we saw this explosion of martech of marketing technology. Scott Brinker actually covers it quite well. We're going to see a very similar thing happen in sales technology and there are a lot of great sales enablement platforms out there. But a fool with a tool is still a fool. A fool with many tools is an even bigger fool. And a Fool with a social tool is an amplified fool. Right? I also say if you suck offline, you're going to suck more online hashtag don'tsuck. Right? So one of the things I think that that really and I love that HubSpot is driving this movement into the sales world. Because if you're in marketing, you've seen this happen. You've had to become more customer centered, centric and obsessed. You've had to really think about things through the eyes of your customer and the buyer's journey. But we're really starting to see that hit sales and buyers saying that they prefer not to engage with salespeople. Because if the salespeople isn't going to lead with value, then why do I need to engage? I can self educate on my own. So there are though good sales enablement tools and technologies that will help you organize content because the content needs to be very accessible to those salespeople. I'm almost out of time. I want to briefly talk about an emerging function within organizations. Sales enablement. Anyone in the room have the official title of sales Enablement? Awesome. A couple people. So would you say that you are the translation engine, the bridge, the glue, the the hook between marketing and sales. So taking really the messaging and the content that marketing creates and salesifying it. Like thinking about how salespeople need knowledge, skills and assets and content to have the right customer interaction. Sales enablement orchestrates as well. It is this really great function. If you can justify it. CSO Insights has some awesome research to help you with that. Serious decisions Forrester. There are quite a number of the analysts out there that are doing a fabulous job really talking about this necessary role. Because here's the thing. If you need to grow revenue, you can hire more salespeople to make more cold calls and send more generic unsolicited automated emails. And salespeople make quota on average about 50% of the time. Or you can invest in making the sales professionals you have more efficient and more effective, more productive. That's really the role of sales enablement is saying we've invested in salespeople now we need to onboard them correctly. You know, time to first deal is a metric to be measured. We need to develop them over their career at our company. We need to give them customer centric training in addition to sales methodology and sales process. We need to give them customer centric content aligned to the buyer's journey. Sales enablement is absolutely an emerging and growing in its strategic importance function. Couple takeaways and then I don't know if we have time for questions, but I'm going to just wrap it with this Content takeaways for social selling Expose sales to the relevant content assets they can use. Make it fast and easy. There are new content enablement tools. It used to be that you had to index, you had to tag content with artificial intelligence, which is something that I'm starting to write about as well, or augmented intelligence. Some of these more modern sales enablement platforms, they actually do all of that for you. You don't have to tag. All of that is actually done via machine learning. So the search becomes much more robust in these more modern sales enablement tools. Collaborate with sales on the kind of content that they need. Identify external resources. Remember those smarty pants people, the experts, the thought leaders, the influencers? Co create content with them. Empower SalesPeople to share OPC other people's content. I'm down with OPC so sharing that other people's content train. I don't know why we don't invest more in training salespeople. This isn't believe it or not, it isn't just second nature and intuitive. They actually need to learn how to find the content, how to share the content, how to add their voice, how to be human. This is something that is a skill set that has to be taught. Making sure you share those metrics on what content is actually working and celebrate and reward new behaviors. So with that I'm going to invite you to send me an invite to connect on LinkedIn. No generic invites. They're hashtag socialstupid. Please connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm on Twitter. I love to engage, not just putting stuff out there. Elrowley and I'm totally happy to take a couple questions. Really appreciate you guys attending the session. Thank you.