Outcome Studio Podcast - Marketing & B2B Technology Talk

Eric Eicher and Bryan Kryder are co-founders of RightHand, a marketing agency based in Indianapolis, Indiana. I invited them on to share their framework for actively aligning stakeholders, such as executives, marketing teams, and sales leaders, to have a common language and goals for marketing campaigns. This ultimately saves teams time and gets better engagement from buyers. They learned this framework after years of making videos, websites, and campaigns that didn't "work" because strategy, messaging, and goals were misaligned.

Brent Patrick is Senior Marketing Manager at Scale Computing. He's responsible for Channel Marketing and Marketing Ops. This includes sales handoff and sourcing leads for the Account Development reps. In Episode 030, we discuss how agile marketing in 2020 has allowed their partners to increase revenue during a tough economic climate. Brent's holds certs in Pardot and the SiriusDecisions B2B Marketing. Certs help him think outside the IT industry, enabling good marketing execution with speed and confidence.

Jasmine Morris and I had blast in Part 2 talking about selling IT solutions to customers in 2020, especially when many sellers have had to execute from 100% inside and marketers have been 100% digital. Jasmine highlights how she doubled down on existing customers by helping them think about their future-state (which has been accelerated in 2020). We also touch on how getting technical certifications has helped Jasmine's confidence and ability to be a holistic seller (Tech, Business, and Human).

Jasmine Morris is an Account Manager at CBTS, selling IT solutions to small and medium-sized businesses in Indiana. She's also the Creative Director at Indy Black Millenials, and she's getting her MBA in Information Technology and has worked on a handful of sales engineering certifications.

In Part 1 of 2, we talk about Jasmine's work in the black community outside of work and how it has made her a more human, grounded professional. We discuss her lived experience as a black woman in tech.

Zach Broome is a Channel Partner at Procurri and he's produced over 30 videos on his "Procurri Zach" YouTube channel. Zach has now been in channel sales in the IT data center and infrastructure industry for almost six years, and for the past two years he's found that making video content as a salesperson keeps his relationships strong during long deal cycles. If you work in sales or marketing at a VAR, MSP, Solution Provider you'll enjoy this episode.

Zach's role at Procurri helps IT Solution Providers sell more net-new infrastructure deals by helping them drive down cost with Third Party Maintenance and hardware buybacks leading up to the old hardware asset decommission and the migration, whether that be cloud or on-prem.

We also talk about mindset, struggles as a salesperson, and how discipline, exercise, working on personal projects and waking up at 5:30am every day have helped Zach find success.

Casey Patrick O’Connor is the Owner of Can Do Can Teach ( CanDoCanTeach.com ).

He is also a mentor of mine and was one of my first managers right out of college when I worked in Sales and Tech Support at GoDaddy. Casey took what he learned after working at GoDaddy as a Leader in Customer Care for 14 years.

He’s an ultra-marathon runner, volunteer firefighter, and helps small business owners and unemployed get better traction with their professional endeavors.

At CanDoCanTeach.com he consults scaling sales and customer service teams, bringing accountability, tools, and process to organizations.

Show highlights:

01:00 – Aaron Intros Casey. Aaron tells a story of how Casey made an impact on him.

04:00 – How Casey’s mother, ultra-marathon running AND time at GoDaddy helped him be a better leader and have a strong mindset. Casey has made an impact on thousands of people in his career. Realizing the person you can become.

25:00 – How do you balance sticking to a plan, being aggressive with sense of urgency WITH a realistic timeline and patience. Starting CanDoCanTeach.com and being accountable for working through a process when you’re not where you want to be yet.

36:00 – Being a student of the process versus Fake it Until you Make it. What’s your philosophy? Believing in yourself. GoDaddy people who followed the process and leveled-up. Aaron learning how to sell from Casey and folks at GoDaddy because of the strong culture, this is systemic with the right leaders and culture.

44:00 – About Can Do Can Teach: candocanteach.com helps scaling teams with training and technology.

Find Casey Patrick O’Connor online:
Casey O’Connor LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseyrunz/
Can Do Can Teach (Casey’s consulting company): https://candocanteach.com/

When do I use podcasting or branded events to get ROI versus make relationships? How do I use LinkedIn to distribute my media if I'm in a B2B business model? Who is best for starting a podcast? Should I be doing video, events, or podcast? What's the strategy for sourcing podcasts guests? Aaron Watson, CEO of Piper Creative, host of the Going Deep with Aaron podcast, and creator the Going Deep Summit discusses all this and more with us on Outcome Studio Podcast episode 025.

Show highlights:

01:00 - Aaron Watson, CEO of Piper Creative, host of the Going Deep with Aaron podcast, and creator the Going Deep Summit. Aaron graduated college in 2016 and shortly after graduation he started his podcast to find his career path since he was uninspired by the traditional career options. A mentor of his showed Aaron the power of digital media. Now he helps businesses achor their brand presence by storytelling either through video, podcast, and other media creation to capture a niche.

06:00 - What was Aaron's strategy for sourcing guests when he got started with his podcast? For him, it was easy cold outreach effort compared to cold outbound sales. It was more fun and he embarrassed himself as he started. As a host, Aaron learned to be conscious and empathetic as a communicator, and to modulate his tone and questions. He used the podcast to critique himself as host and to ultimately become a better professional.

11:00 - "Who do I want to learn from?" is the question Aaron asked himself to fuel the fire to the 400 episode mark. A question that comes up about podcasting, "Be niche or no?" or "Record the episode in-person or remote?" Aaron then discusses why he thinks listeners gravitate towards a specific host's style. Aaron says to stay interested, chase topics you're curious about that may seem like they don't fit a niche thread, but actually do. For example, Aaron talks about his podcast episode 396 with Kristy Knichel on Going Deep with Aaron. She's 22 year President and CEO of 3rd party logistics company, Knichel Logistics, but the real story? Kristy is now transforming her family business as a woman-owned, organically scaled strategy with employees and customer service is bar-non.

17:00 - How do podcasts make money? How do business owners tell stories in a way that builds relationships and trust with an audience of target customers and partners? Aaron frequently turns podcasts clients away. Why? Especially solo entrepreneurs and emerging business owners don't understand the costs to hire out the production work. Whereas, Aaron suggests that they start with video and text. The best podcast candidates are the firms that have an existing marketing budget and they need to reallocate dollars, in which case to podcast is best if there's a good company spokesperson. This scenario gives Piper Creative the opportunity to speak to the project champions at the company to start the podcast.

22:00 - Start with video first and dominate keywords in a niche now. Audio keywording and SEO won't be as relevant in search engines for 36-mounts. While the business spokespeople develop "media creation muscle", video can hide flaws more easily with jump cuts, which is great practice for raw interview and monologue style of the podcast.

27:00 - Is podcasting dead? Aaron discusses how Google is indexing voice for search algorithms and SEO. Plus, in podcasting it's still a wide open opportunity to capture a niche audience. For example, instead of the "Pittsburgh Podcast" it could be the "Restaurants of Pittsburgh Podcast" or instead of "Strength and Conditioning" it could be the "High School Football Coach Strength and Conditioning Podcast". The ability to go narrow and own a corner of podcast real estate is big.

31:00 - What is the power of a physical, branded event and bringing people together in person after doing something like digital media and the podcast? Aaron discusses the Going Deep Summit 3.0 (3rd Annual) which is March 2020.

37:00 - Why do panels at events sometimes suck? Aaron talks about "Design Thinking" that needs to be applied for panelists so that one person isn't dominating. Aaron gives the Pittsburgh nonprofit "Hello Neighbor" example. Aaron then describes how Design Thinking can be applied to create a robust Q&A. His host on stage prompts the audience by saying, "Now open for Q&A, and this time is to inspire our guests to share more of their perspective, not for you to provide your monologue on the topic. Thank you."

43:00 - What are your thoughts on LinkedIn for B2B content and distribution? Video is not required to be successful on LinkedIn. Add value, don't pitch. Take a whitepaper or an informative PowerPoint and upload it to your LinkedIn feed as a PDF. In 2019 and 2020, avoid posting external website links on LinkedIn because their algorithm devalues those posts. Remember the 90-9-1 rule for LinkedIn users, which is that 90% of LinkedIn users don't engage, 9% engage sometimes, and only 1% are actively creating. Aaron poses the question, how do you evaluate success if a post? He reminds us to treat your audience of any size, big or small, with the utmost respect because you never know who is listening.

51:00 - sign off.

This episode highlights that being a fearless professional can be easier with a confidant or mentor.

Occasionally, we luck out and get a company that invests in our training and us as a person. We might get a perfect boss.

Other times, bosses don't help us grow. Our companies might not gel with our styles. What if our management doesn't have the bandwidth to help level us up?

Can a peer mentor you? Can you proactively seek out a mentor? Should you find that individual who's learning and mentor him or her? Seth Thompson (Time Payment) and Kyle Steele (SEO Expert) share how being colleagues evolved into a mentorship and now a friendship, and they highlight how helping each other has made each of them prolific at content and creating professional brands. We also discuss the cross over between sales and marketing and tips for using LinkedIn to build relationships with interesting strangers.

Show highlights:

00:30 - Finding a mentor, stories from Kyle (mentor) and Seth (mentee) meeting in 2013 when Seth was right out of college. Mentor learns as much from the mentee, as Seth was a grinder former athlete and Kyle doesn't do well with routine

04:30 - Deal sizes roughly $30k through 100% Channel Sales, so deals can close in a few months, but the relationship can be about a year long before that deal hits the pipeline

08:00 - Finding a mentor, find someone that aligns with your style, proactively seek out relationships; mentor needs to be self aware that he or she has something to help a younger person or someone that is learning

12:00 - Find who is looking for help "Help who is swimming towards you"

16:00 - The "locker room" presence in the office, may not be manager but energy has to flow through that person to get full team buy-in; what do the senior reps know that I don't when they question management? Should I pay attention?

18:00 - Self awareness, Kyle did you annoy anyone and how did you handle it?

19:30 - cutoff, Kyle talking about hate me cuz they ain't me. "Seth, go be the best you that you can and no one can beat you." -Kyle

26:00 - Authenticity and positive intent, people can feel it in both sales, customer support, and finding the answer when you don't know it all

32:00 - Salepeople knowing marketing, and marketing people knowing sales, how is that helpful?

36:00 - Creating your own demand as a salesperson with content

41:00 - Salespeople know messaging best, marketers invent stuff because they don't have the customer relationships…"The only stopping you from winning is you."

Why should IT solution providers and manufacturers invest in content specific for buyers or verticals, even if it's a core piece of content once a quarter? In the world of IT, solution providers have access to partner portals with great content.

However, when the content is blanket and generic, is the content actually valuable to the customer? Do buyers "glaze over" it? In this episode, Greg Hammer, Director of Agency Services at IMS360 walks us through why a Field Marketer or a Solution provider would want to customize content. We also discuss positioning solutions and integrations with other tech (versus selling single technologies) and how to get sales team adoption.

Show highlights:

• 02:30 - Greg Hammer, Director of Agency Services at IMS360. He has a background in coding/ marketing undergrad/ MBA, and now gets to be both technical and do content for the IT Channel. Greg even worked a job in Yellowpages sales early in his career and has seen the marketing industry transform.
• 06:00 - Definitions for the IT Channel. OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer), Resellers, and Distributors.
• 08:00 - Resellers do solution selling and sometimes partner portal content is too blanket. Manufacturers therefore are starting to enable resellers to start "customizing" content.
• 15:00 - How are we defining content? (e.g. a PowerPoint, versus video, versus email) Content for loyalty/ existing customers, versus new customers.
• 19:00 - Content formats vary, but it always needs to support sales cycle and buyers journey. Best practices working with an agency.
• 22:00 - Content can be a bad investment if it's not distributed. Marketing is both art and science.
• 25:00 - Ways to think about distribution.
• 29:00 - Account-Based Marketing and Persona Development for content.
• 33:00 - Example of how video content helped a reseller tell an in-depth story of a complex solution with one effective piece of content. They built awareness and used it for follow-up with the buyers after sales meetings.
• 37:00 - Parting words.

There are 4 main parts to a successful outbound campaign: List Optimization, Email, Phone, and Social Media. Sure, you could argue paid media might also fall into this as a channel, but let's stick to the basics. This episode 022 with Blake Johnston, CEO at OutboundView, is less focused on messaging and more focused on reducing friction within the tools and channels that help us have conversations. There is a category of technology called "Sales Acceleration" tools that the IT Channel needs to understand, because they can drastically transform your ability to connect with buyers to drive attendance to events, webinars, and other key marketing content for the purposes of educating buyers on complex IT solutions.

01:30 - Recap episode 017 with Blake Johnston on "Personalized Content Promotion", which is using Inside Sales resources to drive attendance to events, webinars, and to get engagement on content like white papers, recorded video, or demos.

02:00 - This episode is a partial case study, since Aaron and Blake did pilot for an IT manufacturer/ reseller in May 2019. What did we learn? In this episode we will put it into 4 parts: list building, email, phone, and social media.

04:00 - List building/ data cleaning fundamentals. Inside Sales team get ZoomInfo or DiscoverOrg lists. Even if the data is good, still need to do levels of validation. First, who are the specific contacts and job titles? Are some contacts a higher priority than others? Second, for events in a few weeks, how many people can you really engage? So second level validation, have people call all the way through the list to figure out direct line/ extension. THEN, third, put the sales team after everyone has been called through.

06:30 - Phone: Auto Dialing and tools that help have more conversations about your events and marketing. Let's say you only have one Sales person. First, that person could just manually dial, which takes forever and is fatiguing. Second, take a a little more automated approach by uploading leads to a tool that sits on top of a Salesforce leads or contacts report. As soon as it dials, it hangs up and moves to the next until you get a connect. Three, next level of dialers, people are calling down the list (sometimes 4-6 contacts simultaneously) and the second a contact picks up, you get the conversation in your ear. Some of these AI tools (like "ConnectandSell") take the stance, "...if you're going to be dialing, focus on conversations, not dialing itself". If event is good enough, the messaging resonates with buyers, then the more conversations you have the more you'll drive marketing engagement.

09:30 - Have Execs sit on ConnectandSell and have conversations (because they're not thrashing on the mechanics of dialing itself). How much would you pay for your VP to talk to X-job title in exact target market?

12:30 - Email: Outreach.io, a Sales Engagement technology for emailing 1:1. How is this different than Marketing Automation technologies? Making emails that look like they come from an actual person in a multi-touch sequence. When you look in your "sent" folder, you see them going out AND it's a consistent message so you can pull data off the efforts.

17:00 - How using videos paired with LinkedIn+Phone+Email can work together for Marketing to Drive attendance. Tools like Vidyard will integrate with these efforts.

21:00 - Don't over-architect process and workflows, but rather know your lists and audience and just start the outbound (making the calls, emails, and social touches). Learn, and then iterate on the first initiative. Closing remarks.

Jason Lestina is a marketer turned software engineer. On episode 021 he walks us through the fundamental concepts in software engineering that sales and marketers need to understand when selling at a software company. We discuss Customer Success and development, agile, product management, and what tools developers use like GitHub and Automation. We hit on Jason's background. We discuss how working in Retail management and computer graphics early in his career moved him into IT Marketing, which then spring-boarded his into doing a code academy in software engineering. Finally, we hit on impostor syndrome for new software developers and how to overcome that.

• 09:00 - He talks to us about how his background in Retail management, American Sign Language, and computer graphics moved him into IT Marketing, which then spring-boarded his into doing a code academy in software engineering.
• 15:00 - How does a marketing background help him as a software developer? Sales sometimes has a bad reputation among technical people, but technical people NEED marketers and sales people to generate awareness on the products.
• 17:30 - Many engineers get tunnel vision on the work in front of them and not the end user experience on the back side of a software deployment. Jason is constantly balancing the engineering bias to be product-first, versus the business bias of being user-first. Both are important.
• 19:00 - What is engineering day-to-day like? We hit on company sizes, ranging from start-up, to mid-sized, to global enterprise size as a software developer impacting software product and soliciting feedback. We hit on basic definitions for Agile, sprints, and how developers go about getting feedback from Customer Success and Product Management to make changes.
• 26:00 - Defining user stories and sprints for developers to scope and backlog work. We hit on how the juggle the work to be done. To manage workload, developers don't time-box work in agile. Rather, they think about it in terms of complexity. Different user stories have different complexities so their weighted differently.
• 30:00 - How does Product and Project Management fit in? How many dollars will this project cost? What do we sacrifice to get things done in different dates?
• 31:30 - What is DevOps, as well as CI/CD Continuous Integration and Continuous Improvement? How do we manage uptime and production? And, what sort of tools and software does development use? Jason says, "If you can't get your code in front of customers, you can't determine if it's solving problems, so we have to ship code faster and iterate". YET, developers biggest fear is releasing software that is broken or full of security vulnerabilities.
• 34:00 - Bigger companies have specific deployment methods, like "gating" which is deploying a small test so only a few users see it, versus the entire customer base. Developer deployment teams can quickly turn-on and turn-off to allow for a focused test group.
• 36:00 - Main Tools Developers use: GitHub biggest thing in tool kit to work on features in safe environment. TeamCity/ NightWatch for automated testing, so the concept of QA Engineers are going away. Software engineers are expected to be their own QA testers with the automation software. They have tools that allows a developer to simulate opening a browser, clicking through the app, and running fully automated tests on code.
• 39:00 - What is a Code Bootcamp and how did it get Jason job-ready? He says there was big financial risk in-terms of the $15k investment for a 12-week program. Dealing with impostor syndrome in software development. Technology industry is booming, and trends for certain jobs showing it's growing and it's a good time to learn.
• 46:30 - What are the 12-weeks in a code bootcamp like and what is the output of the program (final projects, recruiting process with a graduate's new skills)? Jason walks us through.
• 48:30 - What is the difference between front-end code and back-end code? Back-end is data-later, like when you hit "save" that's making a post to some database or table. Front-end retrieves user data off the back-end.
• 51:00 - Discussing the emotional side of impostor syndrome for new software developers. Especially in technology, once you start learning you think you're good, but the more you advance the more you realize how much you don't actually know. It's so vast and complex.
• 56:00 - Being okay with failure.
• 1:00:00 - Closing remarks.

Kyle Lacy is the VP of Marketing at Lessonly, a high-growth, venture-backed enterprise learning software. He is the author of 3 books and he did over 100 speaking engagements around the world between 2012 and 2014 when he was at Exact Target (now Salesforce Marketing Cloud). We discuss ego, your perceived value, storytelling, and using event marketing and personal branding to build meaningful connections with both buyers and peers.

Show highlights:

06:00 - Kyle's music background made him love marketing. Playing in a band got him interested in applying marketing concepts to get shows and promote. Music also taught Kyle how to tell a great story.

09:00 - Ego and your perceived value are reflections of your truth. And, they help you move forward when you're a young professional. One thing that Kyle learned early in his career: if you can't execute and deliver on your perceived value then you're a liar, whether you mean to or not. Kyle started his early career with his own firm, Brand Swag, which was both successful and struggled because of Kyle's ego early in his career.

12:30 - Then, Kyle was on the global speaking circuit at Exact Target (now Salesforce Marketing Cloud). He learned the importance of balancing his personal-self with his professional-self. He felt that if he wasn't careful, there actually wasn't a lot of distinction between Kyle the speaker and Kyle the human. While it was fun for him, his profession got somewhat over-consuming.

14:30 - From speaking so much around the globe, Kyle learned how to tell a story better than his competitors in software. While they were dumping marketing tool feature sets on audiences, Kyle was focused on how lives changed from email marketing and shared those wins, relevant to the audience, whether that was in Germany, Asia, or the US.

15:30 - Kyle is more nervous in front of 50 people or small networking room, but can more easily get in front of a huge room of people. How can I control my personal brand better? In a 3,000 person setting they cannot question you, but in a small setting you can.

18:00 - Executives building a personal brand and network. All LinkedIn is doing is a place to cultivate the network. You can only handle 100 relationships well, how do you handle the rest?

22:00 - managing tech stack, Kyle things about if it's helping to hit goals or not and if it's a nice to have, probably won't buy it as a narrow "point tool"

25:00 - SDRs at Lessonly tying marketing to SDR activity. Doing a lot of direct mail sends. Marketing is good at continuous rapid improvement, which works for SDR team which is very process driven. When running a test, need a kick-off and a retro. SDRs feel more creative under marketing and more license to test.

29:00 - 5 Tradeshows and 14 field events per territory. No presentations, doing "Taste of Lessonly" where prospects come and talk and hangout, versus come and have content. Why does it work? Great customers and people are tired of being sold to. Instead, people just love meeting peers and learn from each other. Don't like when vendor tells them what to do. For paid, doing Google and Bing but no real banner ads. Spends focus with direct mail sends.

33:00 - Paid versus direct mail when thinking about Contact-based approach. Do you spend $300 to maybe put a banner ad in front of that person, or send $100 to get highly personalized direct mail to their desk, and with tracking you know they got it? Too easy to buy tech to scale and automate, but really we're just human. Feature sets are old news, so how do you win

35:00 - Comes back to focus and targeted, who are your lists? If you feel you need leads you're just going to thow money wherever. VERSUS we want 10 top call centers in US, we are going to create campaigns specifically for that. It depends on go to market, because MailChimp is doing something different because their contract values. Fundamentals: know your deal size, know how many accounts you're going after.

39:00 - Getting ready for annual event. NOT a product conference but it's all about learning, developing, and teaching people how to do better work. Most keynotes are customers. How do you have better conversations? How do you share products before you're ready?

Nathan Leary is an IT & Cybersecurity Sales Pro based in Austin, Texas. He is the host of Security + Brews Chat, which is a video series about actual IT problems. He has conversations with IT professionals over coffee, which positions him as an industry expert and a content creator. We discuss his early sales career, how he accidentally fell into IT (and loved it), and how he thinks about video, personal branding, and sales teaming with marketing to really add value to his buyers in the sales cycle.

Show highlights:

• 05:00 - Nathan selling Cutco knives as first sales job to haphazardly applying for SDR jobs after college, looking for a start up. Accidentally ended up in IT sales.
• 08:00 - How Nathan came to know and love cybersecurity without a background in it. He learned from talking to customers about their problems and listening.
• 13:00 - Starting the "Security and Brews Chat". Content in the sales process and include the personal branding piece. Nathan's goal is entertaining and valuable.
• 20:00 - Resources to get started with trending sales, marketing, and prospecting tactics like video. Find frameworks to make your content, then sales reps can plug and chug versus reinventing the wheel.
• 22:00 - How sales can approach marketing and brand managers to do bottoms-up messaging, versus waiting for it to trickle down. Nathan recommends Jake Dunlap for enabling sales to be digital brand ambassadors.
• 25:00 - find a company that lets you take an idea and run with it, especially as a sales rep if you're already taking content that marketing made and make it digestible.
• 28:00 - Frequency of posting content in 2019, don't dilute your message. How do you balance it with your job? It's okay not to scale your brand at a fast rate.

Importance of sales reps answering buyer questions, on video, and then distributing the video on LinkedIn to engage buyers in a way that builds trust and sets appointments over time. Show highlights:

07:00 - Seth Thompson's thoughts on majoring in communications studies. Also part of Powerlifting club. How University of Iowa and athletics made Seth the professional he is today. Valuing intellectual and physical strength and persistence. Not going to get quick wins because guaranteed results are never guaranteed.
13:00 - Idea of injury prevention in competitive fitness is similar to avoiding burn out in business. Doing the little, boring things right over time with discipline to get payoff.
16:00 - How Seth ended up in Sales. Why Seth enjoys customer facing.
21:00 - UCaaS (Unified Communications) as a service. Seth provides different ways for those that provide those services financial programs to help end customers to make purchases. SMB space is Device-as-a-Service, how do I have the latest and greatest and not go out of date.
26:00 - How Seth is acting as an advocate for his customers on LinkedIn. Using social media, not to sell customers but to educate them. Need to be using video because that's the trend to personalize to buyers. Answer questions in a non-biased way. You don't have to be an expert, just try to be helpful.
32:00 - Your personal branding content doesn't have to be perfect! Don't have to over-script, can't fear failure, it's okay to look away from the camera and sound dumb. Putting something out there imperfect is better than never putting anything at all.
36:00 - The internet didn't allow us to share video the same way. Sales people are so well suited in this new age of selling.
37:00 - Concern about not being an industry expert to not technobabble. How do you add value to a customer base without being technical in a technical industry? Seth says that you don't have to share groundbreaking stuff. Think of the top 10 questions your customers ask and "who is Seth?". Start asking questions. That's all you have to do and 80% of buyers will have the same questions.
42:00 - in 6 months you will start seeing return, Sales Navigator. You have to cold call and follow-up after sharing and engaging on LinkedIn.
45:20 - Seth's company wants him to get better at LinkedIn and supports him to do it. Takes it back to his business and makes a case. Virtual networking events. "LinkedIn is digital industry event our our time."
48:00 - Every lead you got at a tradeshow doesn't call you back, either...don't know how to do it without selling." I'm a person first, and then I happen to sell this, too. That buyer must believe in you first to buy from you.
50:00 - Company can take your tools, but they can't take your personal brand.
52:30 - Job hopping and documenting your story on LinkedIn. Protect career.
54:00 - Sales Leaders, you want these personal branding sales reps on your team because they will bring you customers.
55:00 - "I trust Aaron, he trusts his company, so therefore I trust his company." 56:00 - a lot of buyers aren't active on LinkedIn, and even if they are your still have to cold call and email.
57:00 - Final thoughts from Seth, driving the point home about being okay with failure and finding ways to help other professionals in personal development and their jobs.

Show highlights:

• 05:30 - Blake's background, talking about how he did eCommerce around college and mastered it. Then took sales role and realized that he liked marketing just as much as sales. He loved the new customer part. He also describes why enterprise outside sales is a tough role when it comes to closing deals.
• 11:00 - B2B vs B2C, and why B2C marketing is harder. We take a quick sidebar into eCommerce affiliate marketing and why it's a good side project for any B2B marketer. We also talk about how B2C eCommerce is closer to Inside Sales because of the quicker time to close, but with eCommerce you can't hide if your efforts are working or not. The ad sped directly correlates to payments on the website or not.
• 14:50 - We discuss Inbound, outbound, and paid. What are the differences? Inbound - how do you know what to be writing about, what will be interesting to your buyers, and what will get traffic. Creating the content isn't enough because you have to get the traffic SEO. Inbound marketers also need to understand how to execute on conversion and high level strategies that get results. Typically, bringing this in-house requires writers and designers. Outbound - setting up Inside Sales, how do we set up cadence tools, and how do we get to our buyers, plus how to be leveraging marketing automation. Paid - this are is difficult to just dip your toe in because it's complex. Outbound View, Blake's company, does all three of these because even with a good engine going, companies need to diversify because a channel can quit working at any time. Paid efforts enhances inbound and outbound.
• 19:00 - Hiring internal marketing resources is hard, and every single marketing agency service is easily $1,000-2,000. Smaller business owners either have to figure it out on their own, or find the local "cheap guy" in the city to get some tactical results at a lower cost than the big agency.
• 21:00 - ADRs and SDRs - are they becoming a marketing function versus just appointment setters in 2019? Blake is seeing more ADRs rolling up to marketing, but really the ADRs and Inside teams simply need to belong in the group with the best nurturing and oversight. So whichever function can provide that gets the SDRs, which is organization-specific. Typically, there is no compensation plan for Inside Sales people to want to push a white paper, event, webinar, etc. The proposed fix: doing an ADR or Inside Sales rotation where Inside Sales is dedicated to marketing content promotion for entire month in a quarter. Personalized emails work better than email blasts.
• 27:40 - It's not groundbreaking that Inside Sales should help marketing promote content, but if there's not structure to do this it becomes everyone's part time job which isn't effective and not thoughtful. Instead, Blake argues that there needs to be a human caller dedicated to providing buyer value. They're not asking for meetings out of nowhere. They're doing soft call to action, not hard. This method is a good introduction to your company to entire strangers (individuals or departments in existing accounts).
• 29:30 - Account Based Marketing with personalized content promotion, use for new logos or account expansion. Soft to use the call to action as events or webinars.
• 33:00 - How do sales and marketing get aligned for ABM? It can get complex quickly. It requires a legitimate marketing plan for an account, but that won't happen without executive sponsorship.
• 34:00 - LinkedIn ads for targeted accounts. $10 per click is expensive, but it depends on what buyer level you're shooting for. You can pretty easily get to very specific people on LinkedIn. Consider Facebook and Instagram targeting for cheaper if you have a list to upload.
• 37:00 - We discuss free LinkedIn organic methods, and doing social sales cadences.
• 40:00 - Executives are getting more involved in sharing knowledge with the community (especially on Social and LinkedIn) because they have something unique to say versus their ADRs who are new and don't have an opinion yet. Blake says he does podcast interviews or guest blogging because it leads to sales and pipeline and ROI on his time invested.
• 43:00 - Closing remarks from Blake at Outbound View.

Show highlights:

• 01:00 - Shane Healy talking about what got him interested in enterprise software, sales, and marketing. He introduced automation to a job that allowed him to do other work instead of manual processes.
• 05:00 - Using an alumni network and LinkedIn to get a job.
• 09:00 - How did college athletics make Shane successful in the Account and Sales Development Representative (ADR or SDR) role? Practice and constantly working on your craft as a baseball pitcher takes a lot of work. ADR role is the same and you have to decide you're going to be the best, or very, very good.
• 12:00 - How did Shane get interested in Customer Service and how those workflows can be improved by software? Especially customer service in software and how we can do better making it easier on the customer with data and predictive analytics and connecting siloed departments with workflows to connect the back end.
• 18:00 - Positioning value props as an SDR to different buyer personas. For example, in software it's that the buyer can get a better Net Promoter Score with improved customer service. Shane recommends working our way backwards from what problems the customers are trying to solve.
• 20:00 - Reps get too caught up in personalization. Shane empathizes with reps who have to get a lot of volume in their outreach, because his greatest success was leveraging 10k Annual Reports. "We solve a similar problem and helped a similar company with their Net Promoter Score. Outreach.io has a piece of content that helps reps leverage 10k reports. "Don't think these people are too big to respond if there's a problem to solve."
• 23:30 - Being careful in how you mention information you find in your research and having empathy in, say, a cybersecurity breach or an outage.
• 25:30 - Hand-off between ADR and Sales Rep. Shane supported product line team with shared quota with some district managers. When in doubt, loop everyone in internally.
• 30:00 - Shane walks through his ADR process and workflow for breaking into accounts. Shane used targeted accounts and similar case studies that made sense to the other accounts with similar companies. Then, he breaks it out across multiple emails for his cadence, so example: 2 emails problems we solve for similar companies, 2 are trends in the industry, and 2 initiatives with the company over a time period build out in Sales Loft. THEN, LinkedIn and DiscoverOrg are good cross-reference, then everything goes into the CRM.
• 34:00 - Philosophies on calling cell phones. Shout out to Jeremy from LeadIQ. The fact they have cell phone numbers is powerful. Not intrusive if it's not abused.
• 37:00 - Getting promoted from ADR to quota-carrying Inside Sales Executive. His mindset was that if he was close to or at quota, Shane spent time focusing on the toughest meetings his sales reps needed, which helped his internal brand at the company.
• 41:00 - First impression of quota carrying and leading demos, first meetings, deep dives to deal close. One, Shane says understand who you bring in and when (e.g. partner ecosystem). Two, the best sales reps don't know every nook and cranny about the product, but they know how to listen and bring in resources. Two, is time management. Shane has a lot of customers and some have more upside than others, so a sales rep has to choose where he or she spends time.
• 45:00 - Personal branding and Shane's take as a sales rep that they themselves get their views about the industry out there. Shane says you have to bring value as a sales rep other than taking orders, expressing ideas, and being a human is the new form of marketing.

Show highlights:

• 04:45 - Brian Bauer background in online marketing through the 2000's, broadcast television, to now working with new entrepreneurs and small business owners.
• 08:00 - Challenges business owners are facing. His segment is focused on under $10 million total annual revenue, with the vast majority of companies being a couple $100k to the low millions ($2-3 million). They have small marketing budgets and typically don't have staff focused on marketing. Business resolutions are the same as personal ones, and owners are coming into January 2019 trying to map out marketing.
• 13:00 - Challenges these owners face, Brian uses a high school analogy. Being a business owners is like trying to be straight A's on the report card in various subjects. Business owners have strengths and skills gaps. Certain areas will excel while others need help, in either finance, accounting, HR, sales, operations, or marketing.
• 17:00 - Lead generation activities (short term metrics and ROI) are different than brand building exercise (long term metrics and ROI)
• 18:00 - Thinking about a budget, total top line revenue helps to start, then we have to drill down into the nuance of the specific business. At $100k of top line revenue, the mindset is: "how do we hack stuff together and get impact for low cost?" And at $300k, these owners think: "how do we get thoughtful and designate marketing spend?" At annual revenue of $1 million, businesses start to get more traditional about marketing. Business owners ARE willing to invest, but (a) is it the right activity (b) will they get ROI and (c) have they been taught about the right ROI.
• 22:00 - Considering these challenges, how can we offer solutions as marketers? Focus on client problem before our own needs. Owners want to be heard and understood, and if we can show them we understand and that we have a plan, marketers and sales people get credibility right away.
• 26:00 - Marketers must kindle a conversation with the business owner about where potential buyers are hanging out in-person and online. Then, the marketer or sales person must show business owner a strategic and tactical plan for execution.
• 29:00 - How to frame a project or a marketing test to make high impact within 30-90 days. Maximum really is 120 because the owner must see ROI.
• 32:00 - Industry experience as a marketer, does it matter more than the technical skills?
• 35:00 - On framing an ROI discussion and what biz owners care about in reporting with quantitative and qualitative marketing ROI reporting.
• 39:00 - Final remarks and where to find Brian G. Bauer online.

Show highlights:

• 03:00 - Intro, Jeremy got interest in Sales and Marketing wanting to start in sports broadcasting, got internship, which turned into helping the sales team at the radio station. He gets success by being unique in his SDR persona, and in honor of his sports background he wears throwback sports jerseys. This has become part of his personal brand to be memorable to his prospects today.
• 06:30 - Jeremy regrets not focusing on business classes because the business acumen for sales is so important. Jeremy suggests knowing the basics of the industry, job titles, enterprise software, and what these things does for businesses as you are selling or marketing.
• 10:00 - Sales Development Representative world (SDR) and personalization in outreach. Not just for rapport but personalize to the persona and the job function. For example, build a list of your top 30 best customers, and then look at each of their top 3 competitors (that's 90 companies total. Now, you can tell a story about their specific landscape in the competitive space. Another example is that you can look at who YOUR target company sells to in order to go deeper.
• 15:00 - Tactically, we discuss how to manage volume and personalization. 5 minutes or less, get as much information as you can, but record them in your tools (Salesforce and sales engagement softwares). Example techniques, pointing two tactics at each other in the same account, or referencing job postings but then later using relevant marketing content.
• 24:00 - How to structure a Sales Development Representative team. Why we should think about inbound and outbound SDR reps.
• 25:00 - Why invest the time to go deeper and personalize up front to get prospect's attention? Because the data says it works better than blanket, blast email sends and unprepared cold calls. More blanket approach gets unsubscribes than replies, and the replies want to be taken off the list.
• 27:00 - LeadIQ's SDR and Marketing relationship is strong. LeadIQ has better social media presence than companies 10x their size, but it's the power of LinkedIn to build brand as part of strategy. LinkedIn as a lead generation tool and place to talk about the industry. Converting LinkedIn engagement from likes, profile views to meetings is NOT done in a sales-y way. It's not, "hey thanks for liking my post, now here's my product." It's content that's valuable and insightful for target buyers. It creates a natural, not-forced, organic transition. The LinkedIn content warms up the cold call to schedule the demo because the prospect has seen it.
• 33:00 - How video fits in the sales development rep process (for example, Wistia or Vidyard), using our advertising brain we can use "video views" the same way by seeing percentage of the video viewed.
• 43:00 - Data validates and shapes our tactics for prospecting content. Including, having fun on video to send to prospects. It CAN work for any industry, because we are all humans. We just have to humanize the process with the tools we have available.
• 51:00 - how Jeremy suggests getting onto LinkedIn, both for personal branding and helping your company. Crawl, walk, run social selling framework. Crawl: month 1 and 2, observe what is happening on LinkedIn in terms of the right content in your feed. Do this by connecting and following co-workers, partners, customers of your company, and industry thought leaders. If you sell to Chief Information Security officers (CIOs) follow them! Don't just connect, but connect and watch. When to connect? Wait until there is some type of two-way engagement. In the meantime, just follow them, which is different and less intrusive than connecting. Do you like a post? Actually click the like button!
• 55:00 - Walk: month 3 and 4, post industry content on LinkedIn. In the sales space, post Sales Hacker articles or HubSpot blog posts. If you sell to IT people, focus on CXO Talk or similar publications. Watch what your marketing team is doing for sharing content, and then put your own spin on it. Is your prospect and author of his or her own article? Share their post and TAG them. Your effort to build a coalition with your prospect will get rewarded sometimes.
• 58:00 - Run: months 5 and 6, start posting your own original content because you've been watching. You see what's been working. Now you're ready to formulate your own insights and opinions. When you share, be sure to say "I found this valuable for me because..." in any share or comment.
• 01:04:00 - Closing remarks, as you're prospecting in Sales Development Rep role, or in marketing and advertising, don't abuse the cell phone calls or the power of advertising to send something worth the prospect's time. A good rule of thumb: the meeting, email, InMail message, or and other interaction should provide so much insight that will help their jobs that the prospect might even pay for that information.

Show highlights:

• 04:30 - Intro to Tucker Hood, Account Executive at Sigstr.
• 09:50 - Creating video for LinkedIn as a sales rep at the seat at Sigstr, both providing sales advice and sharing thoughts on personal development and leadership.
• 12:30 - Tucker sharing his battles with alcohol on LinkedIn, being 6 months sober.
• 16:30 - How Tucker handled social pressure to not drink, and what sources of inspiration/ mentors helped him quit alcohol
• 19:30 - Does publicly sharing problems with alcohol make it easier to manage? Sobriety enabling career progression.
• 22:40 - Recommendations for others struggling.
• 26:00 - Tucker's tips for success in sales.
• 31:45 - Social selling and what it means to us, ethical ways to do social selling.
• 34:30 - Companies enabling reps to do personal branding with video or written form, outside their companies.
• 40:30 - Be nice to each other, and stay positive.
• 41:30 - Closing remarks about if you're in a bad place how to ask for help, where to find Tucker.

Demand thinking in user experience is beyond a function. It's emotional and social.

Show highlights:

• 02:40 - Sundaresh shares a story about app development designed in "engineering brain" versus "user centric brain"
• 05:30 - Joshua Mitchell talking about his background in User Experience versus just making "a prettier internet" (in the words of Joel Smith)
• 07:30 - Joel Smith origin story, got his start by creating a small web hosting company, and moved to marketing side
• 11:00 - The state of apps and websites in late 1990s and 2000s. "Pretty internet" talking about Flash, adding images and graphics early on. Just adding elements because we could, not because it added value. The question of we have new tool, just applying it because it's cool (examples: blockchain, 3D printing, or virtual reality).
• 15:00 - Bad UX example, talking about introducing Lime and Bird scooters because they are cool but need legislation and rules, so how do we balance.
• 17:30 - Minimum viable product, bargain with user that the product may not be perfect, but also create vulnerability for companies
• 20:00 - Why was starting Design on Tap hard? Josh and Joel describe the evolution from waterfall to agile. Defining waterfall versus agile.
• 27:00 - Marketers, if you don't know what you want, don't pretend you do. But rather work with a partner that will help you discover what you need.
• 33:30 - Are marketers in tough spots in relinquishing control to agency? Marketers and agencies should work with the client to understand the problem, versus just fixing the problem.
• 35:30 - How can we be using data in product development and understanding a buyer's journey. Two considerations: market demand data, and usage data and how the product is experienced. Book by Alan Klement "When Coffee and Kale Compete" http://www.whencoffeeandkalecompete.com/
• 38:00 - Seeds of a movement called Demand Thinking - progress is the process of making change in a positive direction, and we hire and fire products to do that job. Clayton Christensen "The Innovators Dilemma" (https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/12/understanding-the-innovators-dilemma/). Design on Tap uses Heap Analytics, looks retroactively at the "digital exhaust" on existing state of product. Ryan Singer, Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp (https://www.feltpresence.com/)
• 43:00 - Buyer Insights, new service and research framework at Design on Tap to let design help companies create deeper meaning for customers along buyer journey. Why? Providing customers what they want before they even know they need it.
• 49:00 - 2 products, seeking to solve the exact same need with two very different solutions. Functional, emotional, and social components to the product manifestations. Modern customers are thinking, "I'll know a good product when I see it."
• 54:00 - Success story with Indy Chamber of Commerce, example of how to define outcomes but not sure how to get there, but a process to figure it out. Transforming website from something to just keep up-to-date to something that adds value. Shaping customer goals with the agency: SMART goals, learn or earn goals, and customer behavior focused current behavior and influence different. Came up with the goals AFTER the contract was signed
• 1:02:00- Closing remarks