How to Get the Most Out of Your Entire Revenue Motion with Salesloft CMO Lauren Vaccarello

Hi, everybody. How are you all doing? How is day two three of Saster going? Awesome. Okay, so my name is Lauren Vaccarello. I'm the chief marketing officer at Salesloft. We've got about 20 minutes and a ton of content, so I apologize in advance if I go really quickly. Also, can everybody hear me? Awesome. So we are going to talk about how to get the most out of your entire revenue motion. It's a lot of information in the next 20 minutes. All right, first of all, the understatement of the century. Sales is really hard. All right, so who here has all of your AES making 100% of their quota? Nobody. You. We should talk later because it's think people need higher quotas. Who here has every single SDR making 100% of their quota? Who here has everybody exceeding all of their quota? Who here has more money than they need? Again, like, I would love to talk to you and borrow some of this cash. So look, we're all being asked to do more with less. So what we're going to talk about for the next 20 or so minutes, how to get the most out of your entire revenue motion. So this is how I like to think about the revenue motion. Starting all the way from the beginning at inbound lead, Outbound lead to opportunity, to customer, to becoming a bigger customer. Something that's really important to keep in mind is the sale does not stop at the actual sale. You can still sell more to your existing customers. So other thing that I think is really important to call out here is I think every single person here is being done a disservice. We're all talking about the revenue motion. As each piece is independent of each individual piece. Your customers are being talked by one group of people in the lead stage, another group of people in the account executive in the opportunity stage. It's being passed to your CSMs. I hate to tell you, but your customer doesn't actually care that there's people in different departments going through the entire revenue cycle. They see you as one company and as marketers, as sellers, as go to market leaders. We need to think about the revenue motion as one continuous motion, not as independent silos. All right, let's see if I can use this. All right, the first thing I'm going to talk about is one of my favorite parts of the revenue motion, Inbound leads. We'll talk about this for a little while, and then we're going to go into outbound. Okay, so how do we get more out of the leads that we have does anyone have a problem with lead follow up? One of the biggest challenges is that leads are not getting followed up quickly. Let me tell you a little story. So in my last role as CMO at a company called Talend I I joined, leads were taking an average of two days to get to a first touch. Sometimes it was five days for a lead to be followed up with a rep. Do you know what happens when you call a lead five days later? They don't actually care about you. They probably completely forgot they even reached out to you. So one of the most important things if you only remember one thing about my presentation, you need to touch leads as quickly as possible. On the marketing side, this is going to be what you can do to automate lead routing as quickly as possible. If you have a commercial marketing motion. I've had debates about this all throughout my career. A round robin approach for commercial if you have a commercial sales motion, a round robin approach is going to be your fastest path to getting that first lead touch. And also look at automation for that first lead touch to automate that handoff. Another thing that happens a ton are leads get lost. You don't want your leads to get lost. Okay, big tip for everybody. Personalization. I love automated communication. So when I was an SDR in the dark ages, we used to be able to touch as an individual SDR 50 to 100 leads at a time. Now that we are no longer in the dark ages, once you look at something like sales engagement, your SDRs can prospect about 300 leads. The amount of volume and velocity they can get now is tremendous. One of the biggest mistakes people make when using sales engagement and automation is just taking a bunch of leads, dropping them into a cadence, and not doing a thing and wondering where all the results are. You have to look at personalization. You don't need to personalize everything. But think about personalizing 20% of your email outreach. By doing that 20% we see a 2x higher reply rate. So I will tell you another story about where I fell in love with the idea of automation for an SDR process. I was running marketing. I was running marketing at a company. We took over the SDR organization. We had 50 SDRs. We had 50 SDRs. It was taking two to five days for an SDR to follow up with a lead. We weren't using automation. There weren't clear SLAs. We built in automation. We added personalization. I was able to go from 50 SDRs dealing with inbound and outbound. I had 15 SDRs on just inbound leads. The other 35 were redeployed to outbound into prospecting. Those 15 SDRs were driving more pipeline than my 50 SDRs by improving speed to lead, by adding personalization, by having real SLAs involved. The results were incredible. And then the other 35 STRs were on outbound and it was a whole new revenue source. The other thing that we do at salesloft that I stole from our friends over at thrive is we started a weekly leads war room. So one of the things that we started to see was we had lead flow coming in. We had great feedback from our SDRs. What was happening with our sdrs wasn't getting to marketing, wasn't getting to our brand team. So we now do a weekly leads war room with a representative from brand, from product marketing, from digital, from demand gen, and from the sales Org. And every single week, we look at what's happening from lead flow. Where are our gaps? And if we find out messaging is wrong, people in that room can fix it in real time so we can keep moving in a more regular lead flow to get everything we can out of that process. All right, next up, outbound lead to opportunity. Who loves prospecting? Everyone hates it. The reason I don't work in sales is because I hate prospecting. I'm like the worst closer in the whole world. I was a really good opener. I was a terrible closer with outbound. Here's a better question. Who here answers cold calls? Once in a while I do, and it's usually because I'm expecting a call from somebody else. Look, outbound is probably the hardest job anybody can possibly do. So much of the job of outbound is that admin work. You're digging through leads. You're trying to figure out what's going on. You're hoping maybe someone picks up the phone or maybe they don't. So you can just lead a call. So you can just leave a message. The thing with outbound, you can make outbound really, really work, but you can't do it the way we did outbounding back in the dark ages when this was actually my job. One of the biggest things you can do is start to think about coaching, see if it comes back. Nope, different side. What we can do for outbounding is to thinking about coaching. Coaching is an incredible thing you can do for all of your outbound reps to start to understand what are they actually saying? Looking at call intelligence and call reporting, another thing that has completely transformed outbound efforts. Rather than the old days of giving Your sellers. Here is your phone book. Pick up the phone, go start calling. It's not about that. Now you can really start looking at intent data. Intent data is going to show you who is in market, the most important things to closing a deal. The first thing is going to be timing. If someone is interested, pick up the phone, call them as quickly as humanly possible. But if you're. Someone's not picking up the phone and calling you, how do you capture that intent? How do you capture the fact that, that they're interested in your product right now? There's some incredible technology out there right now. Sixth Sense is one of them. Demand Base is another one. I love these techs. We've been using them. I've been using them in my career for five or 10 years. They just keep getting better. They'll start to tell you when your prospects are in market. But what you really want to do is if you take a product like Sales Loft, like Demand, like six Sensor Demand Base, you can find out your target customers are in market right now. That information goes to your outbound sdr, it goes to your ae. It should trigger some sort of a cadence or an outreach function so that they're being reached out to in that moment to know you're interested in my product. Now is the best time to jump in and buy. And you can start with integrations between six Sense and Salesloft. You'll see buyer intelligence, data, data in there. One of the things with it to keep in mind is this only works if your reps are actually using it. The technology is there. You have to make sure your reps use this information. But something that's important to call out is this isn't just on the seller. The sellers will get this information. They'll find out someone's in market. This is also on marketing to provide your sales team with content and information to know someone is in market for your product. This is what to sell to them. This is how to sell to them. Here's content. One of the things that I nerd out a ton about right now is this idea of what you can do in terms of web visitors. And it's this weird hybrid between inbound and outbound. Back in the day, when I was an sdr, many decades ago, someone would come to the website, they jump on, live chat, you'd have a conversation, you would be done. That's not how things work anymore. When someone comes to your website, this is an opportunity to convert them to a customer. And you don't just have to have the conversation. Companies like Drift and Qualified make it really, really easy to convert your web visitors into customers quickly have the conversation online. You can start dropping them into a cadence to build the follow up so you can have the automation behind it. Something that Qualified does right now that's super cool is once a visitor comes to your website, you can find out if that visitor is at Thrive, for example. They're a hot customer, you want to talk to them. You have that data and information. Your seller should know a hot customer is on your website. You want your seller to be the person on chat talking to them. You don't want it to be someone who has no context on that information. You get those buying signals, you drop them into a cadence and convert them. The qualified team is using this right now and they are dogfooding, I hate that phrase, dogfooding their own product. And They've had over 30% conversion rate from a web visitor to an opportunity, which is just absolutely incredible. Drift has had really, really similar results. So start thinking about what you can do to convert those prospects in real time. Okay, you've done an awesome job. Your SDRs are absolutely crushing it. You are driving 30 opportunities per month per SDR. They're doing an incredible job, right? Your lead's qualified, your job is done. I don't make any money off of that. So next up, it's going to be what we're going to do to convert that lead to an opportunity. But here's the thing. This is how your customer feels during the handoff. You've talked to the SDR's, talked to them, they've done a great job, they've qualified, they're interested, they pass it to the ae and your customer is like, who is this person I'm talking to right now? I have to go through the entire qualification process all over again. It's like day one, if you want to get the most out of the revenue cycle, those handoffs between teams are massive drop off points. A couple of really quick tips that seem obvious that not as many companies do. Please log deal notes. Log notes in the account, whatever. You know, one of the things I've heard, I was talking to a Gartner analyst and I was like, what are the problems that every CRO is facing? What is the thing you hear about? And they're like, every single sales leader is like, how do I get people to use my CRM? And that is a massive, massive issue. So encourage your teams to use Deal notes. If you're using a sales engagement software, make sure. It automatically syncs with your CRM. So when your AE is picking up that deal, they actually know what's going on. All right. Opportunity to close. This is where money gets made. How do we get the most out of where money is going to get made? Big issues that they have. There's no real visibility into your deal health gaps. You're not getting the insights you need. How many people are doing a lot of your work in spreadsheets right now and not in your CRM? I was gonna say I was probably more of you, but it's okay. I like to pretend that I never use spreadsheets either. So a couple of things to start thinking about. If you can use a deal engagement score to start understanding are your deals engaged? Engaged. To really get that extra data point and that extra visibility. Something that I push a lot in marketing. A lot of marketers think our job is done at the opportunity we came in. We did a great job. We generated a lead. The lead went over to an sdr. The SDR converted it into an opportunity. I'm being measured on pipeline. My job is done. If your marketer is doing that, they're probably maybe a little under resourced. Also, they're missing a big, big part of the a big part of the motion. How can we make sure as marketers we're supporting the deal through the entire deal flow? One of the things we start to look at, especially in our enterprise account, is building an entire touch plan for deals. So if you have, call it 20, 30, 50 strategic must win deals, work with your marketing team to build that touch plan. To say, what are all the ways marketing can help help provide at bats can help move deals through the deal cycle because we need to help the entire way through. It's not just up to sales there. Also, especially on big deals, bring in an executive sponsor early. Executive sponsors don't just need to happen@close1. If you can bring an executive sponsor in. If you get your chief product offer to show up to a meeting, usually customers will try to bring someone of that seniority level. So it's a good quick tip. We talked about coaching for the SDRs. This is a great place to bring in coaching. So reps who get just three hours of coaching increase their close rates by 70%. And I know we're all really busy. We are all really, really busy. We don't have enough support, we don't have enough team, we don't have enough budget. How can I spend time on coaching? It is critical that you do this. So when you start to think about coaching. There's a ton of technology for you to help with this right now. So it's not all on you think about. You can use things like call recording to start to understand what are they saying? Are there filler words? Is it the right pitch? But there's also coaching products out there that'll start to look at what are the activities that your reps are doing? Are they prioritizing their time in the right way? If your reps are only working two deals, they're probably prioritizing their time. If your rep is working 5 deals, 10 deals, 50 deals, start to look at technology and automation to help prioritize their time. The tech is being built right now to make their jobs a lot easier. Salesloft just released a coaching product that is my only plug and I'm done there. The other thing to think about is forecasting. One of the most important things that we all do and most of us get wrong is forecasting. There's a great video that one of our marketing people put together about forecasting. It's super funny. It's five minutes long. I did not have five minutes for that video. When you think about forecasting, there's a little bit of art and science, but most of it is the this is what the rep believes to be true. And you have some reps who are going to sandbag. They don't think all the information's there. There are some reps with happy ears and then you have the inconsistency of reps. Then go to the sales manager that have inconsistency and then go to the RVP and then are going to go up to the CRO. Forecasting is really, really hard, especially when done manually. We don't have to do this anymore with marketing technology. Fifteen years ago, all of these companies decided marketers had budget and invested in automation. For marketers, sales is finally, finally starting to get your fair share of technology to give you a lot of the automation, a lot of the tech just to make your jobs easier. So start thinking about what you can do with AI and automation. There is this great McKinsey study that said applying AI and for AI to your forecasting can reduce errors by 20 to 50%. If you know there's a problem, you can fix the problem. If you have no idea, you're not going to make your number until the day of when those four deals that were must wins turn out to be six months out. You don't want surprises. Surprises are for birthdays. So start to think about what you can do to really apply AI to your forecasting. Okay, I have two and a half minutes left, which I knew was going to happen. So we're going to go real quick. You closed a deal that was amazing. Guess what just happens to everybody once you close a deal. Your entire pre sales team did an incredible job closing the deal. They sold a great product. You passed it off to your implementation team, who has no idea why they bought the product. I spent about two years sitting in post sales, which I refer to as my penance for being a marketer because all of a sudden I was like, our delivery team said, well, why do they, why do customers think all they have to do is buy our governance product and they're automatically compliant? To which I responded, that's not how our governance product works. Oh cool. That was the entire marketing campaign we put into market. That was the pitch the sellers did. That's not how this works. They're like, no, it's a four month implementation for that. So really important to make sure post sales is not only involved in your marketing campaign, but you have that really clear handoff to know this is why your customer bought the product that you then tell to your implementation team. So the entire time the value that you sold them is the messaging, they keep talking is how they implement your product. Okay, so I'm going to do this really quickly because I took too long early off your challenges with your customers. Something that will piss me off as a buyer more than anything is when I don't hear from you and then 60 days from a renewal, you can't stop calling me. It is about the relationship. So as sellers, we also want them to buy more. They're not going to buy more if they don't use the product that they bought. So after someone buys your product, your post sales team needs to be really cued in to why the product was purchased. And the most important thing is delivering value. Focus on adoption. Make sure your customers are well adopted as much as possible. And again, on the marketing side, our efforts need to be about how do you drive that initial adoption, how do you get them to use the product and how do you get them to use the product? When I was running customer engagement at Box, this was critical. If you haven't talked to Gainsight about things like customer success, qualified leads, go have a chat with Gainsight about it. They're doing an incredible job. And what we ended up doing was integrating product usage signals into Gainsight and then triggering customer outreach from our customer success team. So if they weren't using a product in a certain way. We had a CSM following up and saying hey did you know we did this? The other thing was after we ended up doing that and you have customers using that, you can create something called a customer success qualified lead which is the customer is doing this. By the way. This is a good intent signal to buy more. Then those become CSQLs which then go back into your sales cycle. Don't try to sell your product to someone who's not using what they bought. It's a really good way to start a churn conversation. So really quick jumping to how to create a bigger customer because I love customers. I love when customers pay me more money get them to drive adoption. Make sure customers deliver have value first and then it is about what you can do from the upsell. Think about those CS qualified ELAIDEs use your product intact signals One of the challenges that a lot of customers have for buying more is we all change. Our product changes and grows and evolves. Customers tend to think of you just as who you are when we bought your product. So think about what you're doing to continue to communicate to your customers about how your product evolved. When I was running marketing at box one of the most successful pieces of content that we had at our user conference that eventually came virtual with something called our crystal ball session. Our crystal ball session at our user conference that was eventually virtual which was our head of product going in there saying this is what's on our mind. None of this is committed in the roadmap but this is what I'm thinking about. This is where the industry is going. This is where our head is at. So we had customers seeing that we saw the future in a different way. Do that quickly. Do that to get them involved. Also an executive sponsor program for your bigger accounts and involve marketing in your QBR and your EBR process. One of the biggest things that I've seen is you look at what your pre sales team will look at a QBR deck and go, oh my gosh, those aren't the metrics we talk about. You're talking about something totally different. That is my fun fact and tip for everybody. Look at your QBR or EBR deck. Make sure you're tying that messaging together. This is a work in progress for all of us. But there's a lot of great ways that you can help make it easier to upsell. All right, I'm out of time. Sorry I took so long. Hopefully this was helpful. Couple of big takeaways for everyone. Get the most out of the leads you have. I run the sdr, the SDR team at Salesloft and we are, I mean, I gotta tell you, if you ever want to talk about it, they are freaking powerhouses. They are delivering twice as many opportunities per month than I have ever seen an SDR do and so much of it is from what we talked about here. I would like to take credit for all of their success, but I inherited a really successful team, so I'll do that. Fast response at every stage. Make sure you really nail that handoff, make sure presales is involved in post sales and ultimately if we all focus on delivering value for our customer at every step of the way, the upgrade is a lot easier. That is everything from me. There's a ton of resources in the deck on how to do a lot of this. There's like a monthly business review template.