Short Science Fiction Collection 041 by VARIOUS: Recent Episodes
Lindsay Kelley and Brian Signo
The Yin and Yang Show: A Marketing and Sales Conversation is a sales and marketing podcast born from a former copier dealer marketer and a HubCast sales expert. Lindsay Kelley, President of Prospect Builder, a HubSpot certified Gold partner, worked inside a dealership for 4 years running the marketing department. Brian Signorelli, an entrepreneur and current sales director at HubSpot, a lead generation and marketing automation platform. Together, they tackle the issue of sales inside the office technology space and uncover strategies and tactics copier dealerships and managed can use to reach buyers and grow sales.
I recently had the pleasure of talking with Scott Brinker of Chief Martec about where sales and marketing technology is heading in the future. Scott started his Chief Martec blog to discuss and review technology solutions in the service of marketing or sales -- marketing automation platforms, social media marketing systems, content management systems (CMS), CRMs and content marketing tools. There has been an explosion of technology solutions within the marketing and sales space, and it is difficult to find a category where there isn't some sort of disruptive innovation happening.
When two successful agencies with different specialities combine, magic happens. That's what this week's guests, Marcus Sheridan and Bob Ruffalo, have done...combined the education of inbound with the successful strategies and tactics that bring inbound marketing and sales to life. IMPACT is now an inbound lead generation powerhouse boasting the ability to teach, guide, and or execute the inbound methodology for companies looking to grow leads and convert sales. Bob and Marcus take us through their secrets to success and how their agency feels the future will look for sales and marketing. Don't miss this one!
This week, we're chatting with Peter Caputa of Databox about freemium, what tv shows we're looking forward to, the possible future of sales, and more.
In this episode of the Yin and Yang Show, we take a walk down memory lane and share our favorite episodes of the year. But first, we celebrate the return of Brian Signorelli from his adventures in Asia! #1 Collegiate Social Selling vs. Street Social Selling First up, we both selected the episode on collegiate vs street level social selling with Larry Levine. http://www.convergomarketing.com/yin-and-yang-show/collegiate-social-selling-vs-street-level-social-selling He focused on the three key areas of your LinkedIn profile to pay attention to including: * Value Proposition (where people generally list their title) * Summary * Work Experience #2 SMarketing, MQLs, SQLs, and Why Brian Sig is a Spoiled Sales Brat Next up, we reminisced about the episode with Angela O’Dowd from HubSpot where we chatted about MQLs, SQLs, Smarketing, and how Brian Sig felt spoiled as a rep for the HubSpot sales team due to the amazing efforts of the HubSpot marketing team. #3 How to get buy in for inbound A difficult subject for any marketer trying to bring the inbound methodology into a business environment, “buy-in” is always a huge issue. Here are the top seven tips we chatted about for getting buy-in on inbound: 1. Talk about competitors 2. Do a free trial of HubSpot 3. Talk to counterparts and peers 4. Do an inbound marketing workshop for the main players at the company 5. Use the HubSpot website grader at https://website.grader.com/ 6. Utilize free tools - using the HubSpot platform, the HubSpot LeadFlow tool, or another marketing automation platform is a great way to get started small and make the case with data. To make your case with data 7. Show me don’t tell me. Bring the data to your decision maker. #4 Understanding the Why We always love great guests and George B. Thomas from the Sales Lion is no exception! We conversed with Goerge about education when it comes to inbound and why it’s so important to the success of your inbound strategy. And we have to mention George’s three main philosophies to live by: * Be Human * Be Happy * Be Helpful #5 Building an Inside Sales Team vs. an Inbound Sales Team We had the renowned Trish Bertuzzi, author of The Sales Development Playbook, join us for an episode over the summer and wow was it an eye-opener. Trish was able to get Brian thinking about how the world outside of inbound sales is functioning and how different sales methodologies are embraced and used in businesses large and small. He stepped outside the HubSpot bubble to discuss with Trish how the rest of the world thinks of sales and selling.
In the inbound world of attracting and nurturing folks throughout their journey, we don’t often take pause to explore how powerful personalization and segmentation can be. This week, Chris Bintliff (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbintliff/) from Not Really Rocket Science talks about the Why, What, and How of personalization. He shares tips on how to start your personalization efforts for both large and small budgets. Here are the top takeaways from our conversation. Why: Personalization is really about being reactive, in as “real time” as possible, to subscribers, prospects, customers. It’s the “now what” to content marketing that asserts a kind of finish line at capturing an email address Yet most people unsubscribe because of irrelevance. We usually save “customer satisfaction” for inside the business relationship, building entire business models around developing customer loyalty. Personalized marketing shortcuts this with delight before the sale. Personalization is a pathway to delight. What: We have to go beyond just hello [first name]. Automation tools like Hubspot, Drip, ConvertKit, you name them allow us to deliver deep and specific insights What emails are being read? What links are being clicked or triggered? Which website pages are being looked at? What lead magnets are being accessed? All insights we can use to build a progressive profile of a subscriber to define specific traits that we can then personalize messaging to. Think hyper-segmented. How: Personas made practical. Start with functional role. Who are they in the buying scheme? Could be a professional role or a station in life. “Executive vs Marketing pro” or “New to fitness vs experienced with fitness.” With just that one data point you can start more effective personalization, like sending prospects to a sales page geared more towards the newbie vs the veteran. Next look for motivation. This comes from things like surveys in your emails, recording content they download or blogs they read - which means you have to be intentional about a diversity of content, or progressive form fields in Hubspot. Try and ask just one extra question from time to time. Now you can figure out if your subscriber is trying to get off the couch for their first 5k or run their fastest marathon. Totally different audiences that you can tailor your digital sales message for. Finally try and assess emotional need. This will take more time and experience and maybe some manual involvement. Why are they motivated as they are? Somebody reading a blog post about the health benefits of exercise might be in a different space than those reading about the top gadgets for summer running. You might learn if this is a luxury purchase or a distress purchase. Don’t boil the ocean - start small with “smart segmenting” and build specific workflows around content strategy to keep things as automated as possible. It can take time to build the engine but then the automation should help it run itself. Build on the engine over time and within reasonable boundaries. Stay organized - automation platforms will help you immensely, but at the least connect personas with content strategies with segments in a spreadsheet. Develop insights: Build specific pay per click and social advertising for specific roles, motivation, and emotional needs. Somebody clicking through an ad geared towards men in their 50’s already tell you a lot about them. Tools like Wistia can help you understand who’s watching your videos and for how long. Outcomes: Build separate sales pages on your website. A call to action to the fitness newbie might sell your First 5k Package to one audience and your Fastest Marathon Training Program to another. Customize some pages on your website. A small change in text or to a headline can suddenly speak to a totally unique audience. “We help people like you get off the couch and develop healthier habits” vs “We help athletes like you run your fastest race.” New platforms like RightMessage let you make changes to your website that reflect in real time to behaviors from a visitor, from the referring url to tags in some automation platforms to UTM content in a web url. This lets anybody build essentially infinite pages tailored to specific audiences. Chris has created a free interactive personalized email course that only takes 30 minutes. You can check it out here. https://notreallyrocketscience.com/automation-personalization/inside-high-performance-sales-page-rightmessage-drip/ Keep Talking!
There’s a gap in between the inbound methodologies. As an agency partner, I know we have felt the missing link between the marketing lead and the sales hand off. This week, we talk to David Fletcher from Maven Sales Group about how they fill the gap. Something has to happen before your inbound lead is ready to move through the sales funnel. Having a team of SDRs to sit in between the marketing and the sales leads helps move a prospect through the sales funnel much more effectively. Journey with us as we explore how David and his team can be that missing link between sales and marketing in the inbound world.
Technology is changing the way people think and behave based on the tools we now have available. Reps need to learn to evolve and transition their traditional conversations to digital ones. Learn how to leverage your networks...digitally. There are three things to make a successful social sales process. In this episode, Larry Levine from Social Sales Academy brings us his insight on these three things and how to find sales success with social selling. Larry challenges sales reps to think differently about themselves and their market. Along the way through coaching, they feel good about how to align with their buyer and engage in a digital conversation. As we turn to the case study of social selling success, accountability from upper management is cited as a key reason this company found sales success. They followed the instructions from Larry and have seen success ... each rep was able to get a sale from integrating sales into the process in the first 90 days of implementing this strategy. This is a transition to a digital conversation. Think you can keep it going? Keep talking!
As a sales rep, if you go to a networking event and stand against the wall without speaking to anyone, it’s a waste of time. How can you expect to make connections and grow your network? It’s the same with social engagement. Social media channels are an excellent way to build up your digital presence - your digital soul. But you have to begin by actually sharing content and building your audience. In today’s show, we talk with Brandon Lee, founder of the platform YipYip, a one for many social sharing platform. He shares stories of how a single user is able to share content out to the entire sales’ team’s social channels, varying the time and message for each. This is the conversation starter on your social platforms. Then, the reps can engage and pick up the ball from there. With sales reps time being stretched so thin, a process like this, which has the ability to share content on behalf of the sales rep, can be a great conversation starter, leading to a sale. Keep the conversation going!
As buyer’s evolve, search engines evolve. So as product and service providers what can we do to evolve along with our buyers? In this episode of the Yin and Yang Show, HubSpotter Amanda Smith take us through what Google is looking for and gives us 7 keys to creating pillar content.
I’m fresh back from INBOUND17 and in this episode I’m sharing my favorite new features and functions HubSpot will be rolling out. Sales Professional - What I loved about sales professional is the sequences tool, call recording tool, and insights into the prospects email opens. Coming in November, HubSpout is going to add in workflows, predictive lead scoring and smart notifications. It’s a more robust CRM than when it first rolled out and just seems to get better and better. Sales reps rejoice! FB Ads Facebook Audience Sync allows you to sync a HubSpot list you have in your portal with Facebook so you can target that specific list with a specific ad. Leveraging the data you have in HubSpot, which has all the behavioral analysis of your visitors - you can now target them AND look alike Facebook users inside the Facebook platform. Facebook audience sync highlights: Hyper targeted messages and ads through facebook Take smart list and turn on Facebook audience sync inside HubSpot and it allows you to target these folks whenever they’re using Facebook Create smart list and target your best customers inside of Facebook! And even better, you can create the Facebook ads inside of HubSpot! Conversations This is through the messaging app as well as wherever the customer wants to engage - that might be on your website or through Facebook messenger. HubSpot Conversations Every channel in one place - social and on website Everyone on your team can join conversation when needed - they see full history Now in HubSpot CRM free AI Motion .ai ChatBots are a great way to answer real time questions for your website visitors…especially if you’re not at the office at 2am. A chatbot can handle the question and properly route it internally for you. You can build out a series of responses based upon trigger words in the customer question and the bot can route the customer to the proper department for a deeper conversation. HubSpot CMS - no more COS First off the web evolves faster than we can keep up! HubSpot knows this and has been working on new advancements to the CMS make it more: Fast, stable, and secure HubSpot CMS highlights: It’s 2x faster than the average North American CMS Achievements - 99.999% uptime More secure - standard SSL to all by default Also, there will be a module you can insert into your HubSpot CMS site for Native site search in next few weeks.
If you’re looking to find interview tactics for your next interview with a sales rep for your company, this podcast episode is the place to start. HubSpot veteran Brian Signorelli shares the top six things to interview for in a sales rep. Intellectual curiosity Ability to be a good listener Empathy Humility Self Awareness (perhaps the most important one of them all) Demonstration of firm business acumen Additional qualities to look for in a sales rep are the GSD (get s$*^ done) quality and money weakness.
We explore sourcing and connecting with the right sales rep candidates. Brian Signorelli offers his top three tips: Outreach - how to reach out to reps fitting your ideal profile Messaging - what to put in your messaging and subject line to get a high response rate. Candidate Tracking - Track it and keep a list of reps you reach out to in your CRM so you can track and manage
Since Brian Sig was off doing something exciting (it’s a secret, so I can’t tell you what he was doing), we’re sharing a podcast I was a guest on a couple weeks ago… Celebrate the Wins with Yip Yip founder, Brandon Lee. Brandon and I dive into a sales win that my agency, Prospect Builder, experienced with a client. It’s an inbound sales win and the story is a textbook example of the evolved buyer and how they buy today. Enjoy the show!
Inbound is a confusing term. In this episode, we are joined by Trish Bertuzzi, author of the Sales Development Playbook. We dive into the “Trish brain” (her words, not mine!) of what is an inbound sales team versus what is an inside sales team. There IS a difference. You’ll hear how to take a step back and think about which type of team you need. But before you can do that, it’s important to understand your sales cycle, buyer type, average deal size…yes, the variables matter. That’s what you need to understand before you build your strategy. Find Trish’s book, The Sales Development Playbook on Amazon or download a few chapters here for free.