Outcome Studio Podcast - Marketing & B2B Technology Talk

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.

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:

• 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 ...

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