Become a Trusted Partner for Your Customers: Owler and a Panel of Sales Leaders Tell You How
How do businesses stay relevant to their prospects and become trusted partners - not just another vendor in this new virtual world we live in?
Owler’s webinar with Tenbound: Conversations With Context: Building Relationships with Your Prospects & Clients
That is a question central to understanding how to sell better to your clients and become a go-to vendor.
Owler and Tenbound held a dynamic webinar to discuss this topic.
Our panel of experts; Joe Venuti, Vice President of Sales Development at UpKeep; Jeff Bajorek, Advisor and Coach to B2B Sales Leaders, and our very own Nathan Steele, Head of Owler’s Customer Success, dive in
Break Through the Noise
Are you someone worth talking to with something worth talking about? What do you bring to the sales conversation? Do you carry a different point of view? Do you bring some insights? All of these questions are key to knowing how to sell in our modern sales environment and being able to build lasting relationships with your clients.
Before COVID-19, as a sales rep, the approach was to show up, bring food - maybe doughnuts, buy lunch - and make friends with your client. Sales reps were able to build a relationship with clients so that, hopefully, they would choose to buy from them. Jeff Bajorek, Advisor, and Coach to B2B Sales Leaders, says this approach was and still is misguided.
“You have to cut through the noise. Decision-makers have other sales reps from other companies calling about other decisions they need to make. You need to stand out in some way. You can't just say, ‘Hey, I'm Jeff, I'm a really great guy, and I'd like to buy you food. Will you give me 15 minutes of your time, 20 minutes of your time?’,” states Bajorek.
That ‘handshake and donuts’ approach still works in some sectors, but not as many as it used to. Do you have something to add to that conversation with the new context? Having access to sales trigger events, such as funding, leadership changes, and more, gives you a better, more relevant reason to reach out.
“You can't take the same message and deliver it to 1000 people and hope that 50 of them pick up the phone or reply to you. I think we can do better,” notes Jeff.
So, what is the missing piece?
The evolution of prospecting
There has been an evolution of prospecting over the last few years. First, it was 100% cold calls, and email automation came out, which was more manageable, and it worked. People then pivoted back to phones with the advent of COVID-19. Now there are things such as direct mail and intent data. Sales reps must break through the noise, but how?
“Sales and sales development is a human-to-human relationship. It's very, very obvious to the prospect when someone's done a little bit of homework and actually understands something about you, the human. Personalization at scale was such a big buzzword over the last few years, and it's really, really hard and time-consuming to scale personalization. It really boils back down to having good solid processes in place,” said Joe Venuti, Vice President of Sales Development at UpKeep.
An example of this process is ensuring sales and marketing work hand-in-hand to develop messaging. Marketing provides some hype and umbrella outreach, for example with an email marketing campaign; then, sales reps have their initial sales outreach targeted to the personas interested in the marketing campaign. When the sales development rep or sales rep gets on the phone with a human being, it should be a human-to-human conversation. This is an essential part of the sales cycle.
“It's very easy to say ‘it's really hard to build a repeatable process around high-level personalization’. It is, but I think that it's really incumbent upon leadership to build the process for you. What I mean by that is tear up the database, tear out the accounts, do something so that your SDR/BDR team understands; these are my top 10%, these are the ones that are showing intent data, these are the ones that just got funding, whatever your trigger is. Now I know I've got 10,000 accounts. I have got to prospect to personas to try to generate interest, but these top few are where I'm going to invest my time into really doing that next-level of research. I'm not going to put them in a cadence - all of my emails are going to be one-off. If I'm using direct mail or something like that, this is where I'm going to apply that budget,” notes Joe.
This type of hyper-personalization process means sales reps have high velocity, low friction, and a repeatable process. This process starts with your sales, development, leadership, and demand gen. There has to be deep-level enablement of the personalized experience for the sales team to execute it. Sales reps shouldn't be responsible for building that process for the customer.
“At the end of the day, we look at dials; we look at talk time and emails. If they [sales reps] are trying to personalize to 10,000 people a week, they're going to say to me at the end of the week; I don't know why I only made 10 dials. I felt like I was working. I was working hard all day. They were working hard. They were working hard on the wrong things you have to spend every day working on, not getting ready to work,” explains Joe.
Developing a solid personalization process
With a bit of research on Owler Max, to learn more about the company, its competitors, and its vertical, and with research on LinkedIn, you can find out where the prospect went to school and their favorite sports team. That right there is your first step to effective personalized outreach and your insight into the perfect subject line. Dumping 600 people into a sales automation email sequence or a cadence and managing your reply rates - that doesn't work anymore. You have to hyper-personalize.
“For sales specifically, it's really important to have a repeatable process. But you don't want to make a repeatable communication point. You can't take the same message and send it to 2000 people and expect people to pick up the phone. My dad taught me a ridiculous amount about sales. He was a commercial lender for 32 years in Spokane, Washington. Everybody during that time who lived in Spokane, Washington, whether they were working with my dad or not, knew who he was. All he did was simply stay informed about the companies stay informed about the regulations around the business in the space. He was just there to answer questions. He would send really relevant articles; ‘Hey, this just came out in the Business Journal. I noticed that you're mentioned in it, or I noticed some of your competitors are mentioned. Just a heads up!’. He was always available, and he was always a resource, and he basically became a person that people wanted to know,” explained Nathan Steele. “That's a big aspect of sales, especially in the customer success. I can be just another customer success manager. I can be somebody here to help you. But, the reality is if I genuinely care about your business space and I genuinely care about the industry you work in, I can present helpful things. To you.”
Even if that person is not a customer right now, by being there, and developing that relationship of reliability, when they do want to buy something, their first thought is going to be that person that built a relationship with them.
Building relationships
Building relationships with customers is not a path to a quick sell. This is where salespeople get prospecting wrong. They feel like they have to do this thing today to make a sale by the end of this week because they have a month’s quota in June. But, sales reps will have a Q3 to hit; they will have 2023 to hit.
“You're out there building a reputation, which ties into your personal brand and your network within the industries you serve. I've been working a deal right now. It's been two and a half years. It's a really good deal. It's going to be worth it. I'm not hanging my head on it yet. But we're progressing along the way. If I'd have given up on it. I wouldn't be able to do this work. Sales don't always take that long, but sometimes they do. It's okay. Salespeople are too quick to throw deals away.” says Jeff.
There are a lot of variables along the way. But, according to Venuti, if you give a prospective consumer an excellent prospect experience, from start to finish, you'll see those deals come back to you, especially in the SAS space.
“Often if somebody goes to an inferior product or it just ends up unhappy with the decision they made - and because they had a great experience [with you], they ended up as an inbound eight 9, 10, 12 months later. So all that work is not in vain. Just because you lost that deal on the front end,” notes Venuti.
There are many ways that a sales rep can break through to a client, whether that’s personalization or whether that’s relevance.
“Just think about everybody else that's trying to reach your prospects. How are you going to stand out, and why is taking your call going to be more valuable than taking the average sales rep's call. If I work for you, and you tell me to do exactly what I'm supposed to do, and then I do it, and it works great. I'll take all the credit, and if it doesn't work, I'll take none of the blame because I just did what she told me. That's a great way to just remove your own responsibility right from the process,” says Jeff. “Take an extra few seconds. I know it feels like you have a million people to call and 100 million emails to send but take just a few extra seconds and think about how you can make each one of those touches more valuable. The math works. You can have a higher conversion rate if you just put a little more thought into your outreach instead of going through the motions. That's what these [sales enablement] tools provide you with.”
Everybody responds to things differently. Therefore, do not be a one-trick pony. There are a billion tools and a million avenues at your disposal to do prospecting leveraging personalization.
“You can be the best carpenter in the world, and I can ask you to go and build me a house. You say, ‘Yeah, Joe, I'll build your house’. Then I hand you a screwdriver. You cannot get the job done without your entire toolbox. So use all of these tools at your disposal, and you'll be far more successful, rather than just one or two things, because that may not be what clicks for that prospect, but something else in their toolbox will,” states Venuti.
It's almost impossible to make personalization repeatable, so how do you make personalization something that you can do quickly? Sales reps may only have a week to spark a conversation, so developing your personalization strategies is essential.
“We're building that really big pipeline of having these people that keep coming back as valuable. But making that personal connection is hard. With Owler Pro, the nice thing about it is I can come in, set up all the accounts that I'm working with, whether it's my leads or accounts opportunities, and then choose insights into the product. To say, hey, if there's a funding announcement, if that company wins an award, if there's a major leadership change, whatever it is, I can have that sent to me in Slack, in my CRM, and by email. I instantly know that information in real-time without having to go research and without having to go Google companies before I call them. I know this company just hired a new VP of sales. So I'm immediately going to research who that person is, I'm going to research their company quickly, and say, Hey, awesome. I now know this person; I know why they're here. I read the article about them, and I can personalize that message to them. So Owler gives me the ability to make it repeatable,” notes Jeff.
Using sales enablement tools, such as Owler Pro, you remove the obstacle of the hours of research that it takes to do personalization, you remove the pain points, and make it much easier and doable.
