023: How IT Solution Providers Use Marketing Content to Speed Up Sales Cycles

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.