Top 5 Resolutions for Sales Teams

Val: Hi everyone. Happy new year thanks for choosing to spend part of your day with us.
I’m Val Riley head of content and digital marketing at Insightly CRM and I’ll be your host for today’s webinar. For those of you who are Insightly customers, thank you so much and we hope there are a few future customers out there as well.

We are live. We would love to hear from you so please use the chat or Q&A panel throughout the webinar and we’ll answer your questions. We have a team live to answer and we might hold a few for the panelists at the end.

Speaking of the panelists, let’s meet them first. Please say hi to Jen Allen-Knuth. Jen was a full cycle Enterprise sales rep for 18 years; she sold $50 million and more to C-level sales marketing and strategy Executives while at Corporate Executive Board, Gartner, and Challenger Incorporated (that’s the folks behind the Challenger Sale). She was Chief Evangelist at Challenger and also at Lavender. Today she is a keynote speaker and owner of DemandJen, Welcome Jen

Please also welcome Chip House. He is responsible for Insightly’s marketing strategy content digital and lead generation as CMO of Insightly. Chip has more than 25 years of experience working with high growth SaaS companies and he has led inight leads marketing team for more than two years.

We had a poll open and I’d like to go ahead and reveal those results Chip it looks like people are most excited about leaving layoffs in the rearview mirror which I’m sure we can all breathe a sigh of relief about.

Chip: Yeah exactly lots of strange things happened in 2023: interest rates, layoffs, budget cuts, for those of us in the GTM space. If you have something else please put it in chat that you think is something that really moved the needle last year that you’re excited to leave behind.

Today we’re talking all about 2024 so so let’s dive in everyone so let’s flip back to 2024. We wanted to frame this conversation a bit Jen to talk about why salespeople and leaders need to be making resolutions in the first place and what’s going on in the market that is really mandating those changes.

As we talked about this a few Market Market forces quickly emerged for us and those of you that have joined live please feel free to drop any thoughts you have on what we’ve picked or anything else that you think we may have missed in terms of high level forces that are kind of moving and changing things for go to Market teams and salespeople.

So the first thing there is related to email deliverability regulations and personalization so we had a collective scare back in November about about mail deliver deliverability regulations and businesses that send 5,000 emails a day which is a pretty low n ber when you think about it we going to be subject to stricter metrics on spam complaints by both Google and Yahoo and Google holds the lion’s share of B B2B inboxes out there if you didn’t know that so that could be very very impactful.

It was walked back to only apply to Gmail or yahoo.com addresses but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to come around again so therefore personalization which has been having a moment for quite some time is about to become even more important and Jen what are your thoughts on that I know I know that we talked a little bit about this and what what are your thoughts about what this does to us

Jen: We’ll get into some examples of like what to do but one of the stats I heard that blew my mind I am not a big sales book reader I will own up to that but there is a book called Sales Innovation Paradox that came out last year it was written by a guy by the name of Dr Howard Dover. He’s a professor down at the University of Texas-Dallas and he runs their sales University program down there.

In the book he shared this stat that absolutely blew my mind which is this in the last seven years there’s been an a 1000% increase in the number of SDRs mind-blowing if you think about all of the tools and Technology we’ve now armed those SDRs with it gives them the ability to send at a much higher rate than they ever were before so you’ve effectively 10 timesed their Outreach so you add those two numbers together I’m not a mathematics major by any means but what that means is we’ve got a 10,000% increase in the amount of prospecting activities that are out there. Buyers are inundated with noise and for many of us we’ve focused on what makes our job easier instead of what makes buyer outcomes better so this is a problem I’m super pmped to get into with you today.

Chip: Yeah, excited about that I was blown away by that stat Jen when I first saw it from you and I’m feeling it in my inbox and maybe maybe people out there as well if you are a buyer of of anything out there you’re probably feeling that increase in your inbox. I’ve been in the email space for over 20 years and frankly if you want to be in the inbox you just have to send engaging mail that gets opened and clicked and replied to that’s simply the the bar that you need to think about.

Another force is Tech consolidation and COI or the cost of inaction which we’re going to dig into more in short businesses are using fewer applications really than ever and that more of them are sticking with their current Tech stack even after being in market for something new so what do you seeing

Jen: yeah I think this is something we all felt the pain of last year which is we exited these days where like cash was everywhere and shiny object syndrome was prevalent and I could just buy things Willy willy-nilly and then the market totally corrected.

Then we’re sitting there having a conversation with customers who are looking Us in the face saying yeah you’ve got a better solution but I just can’t pick this problem to solve right now. So the idea of I sell better as a salesperson what we’re finding is it’s it’s working less and less so now I’ve got to be really sharp about how do I get the the prospect to pick this problem to solve out of everything else.

So we’re going to get into ‘cost of an action’ how we do it what it is so we can make our problem the one that gets selected by our Prospect

Chip: Yeah that that’s great and certainly there was a time for every Point solution Under the Sun to have its day in SaaS and you’re seeing some of that go by which is frankly okay for a CRM provider because we consider ourselves kind of core functionality and and a lot of people are still buying CRM

Another force that we can’t seem to shake to be getting even bigger is the impact of consensus buying. It’s now estimated that 83% of a buying group’s time is spent without the buyer so when you have multiple buyers in an organization they’re doing the research they’re talking to each other and what does that do to a sell well if we think about it the 177% of the time that customers spend with sellers it’s not with me or with you it’s with all sellers across all categories of spends that they’re looking into so what that actually means is I’ve got this itty bitty little piece of the pie so when I first saw that stat as a sales rep I was like I can either try to make my slice bigger or I can look at where else they’re spending their time so as you mentioned Chip they’re out there learning from doing their own research online or talking to the buying group or talking to other people who have similar roles what I realize it is far more effective and far more of a greens space opportunity if I find ways to work my way into the 83% instead of trying to convince or compel that that buyer to give me more of the 17 so we’ll talk about how do you activate a learner and how is that different from how we treat hand raisers who are holding up their hands saying I want to buy something and I want to buy it now yeah and that’s why the partnership with marketing and sales is so critical frankly because marketing has the biggest levers to be part of that initial consideration set for the buyer when they’re doing all their research so and then the final thing and this this is true with me as a buyer I just have higher expectations and Jen I honestly you shared this awesome graph with us that was from a survey that gong did do you want to dig into this a little bit and what does it say to you yeah you can already tell I’m a huge nerd for sales data so bear with me but effectively what gong did back in March is they released this study which showed buyer sentiment about sellers who were reaching out to them and this I’m going to read this to you this is going to sound very Doom and Gloom it’s not meant to if anything this is an opportunity for us as salespeople because the bar is so dang low so what this is showing us is on average across the buyers they surveyed in B2B only a quarter of buyers felt that the seller reaching out to them even understood the buyer’s role I can’t think of buyer in go to LinkedIn and look right yeah right and fundamentally understand what is that person held accountable for how are they measured what is the thing that’s going to get them fired hired promoted if we don’t know that it is really hard to compel someone to say let me give you some of my time to learn from you so really low bar there the next one they only 133% felt that the sellers message was addressing a relevant chAllenge well if we look at a lot of Outreach it’s very easy to understand why in many cases we’re not even talking about what’s relevant for them we’re just like here’s what I have do you like it here’s how shiny it is n ber n or n ber three only 9% of buyers felt that the seller’s message was personalized to them which is actually kind of wild because when you look at the actual data it shows that only 4% of messages are truly personalized that 96% are automated which is mind-blowing and then lastly this hurts my my beautiful little heart as a former chAlleng your gal which is only 6% of buyers felt like they learned something they didn’t know from the sell’s message and that to me is a place we’re going to dig into later it’s a huge opportunity area for us salespeople yeah it really is I can’t remember the last time I learned something from somebody who emailed me so yeah I think that kind of meets the bar as well so well let’s D dig into the resolutions so given all of these Market forces here are the five resolutions that we believe that sales people sales leaders need to be making this year and the first is resolving to learn what’s really behind objections from your buyer the second is to learn to love your personal pipeline report and the third is resolving to embracing COI as I mentioned cost of inaction and excited about that discussion Jen n ber four learning how to make real email Magic so how do you improve your emails to really work in the Inbox and n ber five finally committing to social selling and I’m going to talk a bit bit about that as well with my experiences and we’re going to drill into each one of these one by one and so n ber one is a deep dive on objections the type and the meaning behind them so we’ve been taught to overcome objections using the feel felt found method or a lot of salespeople have used that method and and what that means is first empathizing with the customer to and showing how you feel n ber two you appeal to somebody else’s experience and say that other people or companies had a similar problem or felt the same and then finally present what other people or companies found but Jen you have an interesting take on this because it’s not just overcoming the objection you think that it’s maybe better to First understand the objection and drill into that and Jen the other thing that I learned from you is you kind of categorize objections as current versus future so can you dig into both those topics yeah first let me ask you Chip have you ever been feel felt founded on a sales call for sure yeah it doesn’t feel icky right it’s like I’m voicing something that I perceive to be an issue and then I met with well I’m sorry you feel that way but everybody else feels this way it’s what all the it’s doing is it’s creating distance right so in my opinion the cringiest sales topic ever is overcoming objections because objections are information information is what we need to be able to effectively sell to a prospect so if I am so focused on trying to get the customer to change their mind what I’m doing is I’m not actively actively listening to something that is potentially a significant deal hurdle so my reframe of how I think about it is I’m not rushing to say oh no no no don’t worry about that like your objection is not founded in any sort of reality what I’m doing is I’m slowing down I’m taking off my seller hat and I’m saying let me first understand it and to understand it we have to classify it into one of two types of objections so the first type of objection is what I call a current state objection now the research shows that on average about 40 to 60% of deals will be lost to no decision and a big one half of like one part of the reason for that is because the customer actually looks at the problem and says you’re right we’re not doing this the best way we could but it’s okay for us it’s working the House isn’t on fire right good is good enough and if that is the objection it does not matter how much I play Up R Roi or how much I say this is how great this feature is because the customer has decided I am okay with good enough so in order to overcome a current state objection as we’re going to talk about later I have to actually help that customer determine is there a cost to their in action so current objection is n ber one future objection is all the what if questions so the other big reason that that deals died to no decision is because of indecision meaning I now agree like I know this is a problem we’ve got to solve but when I look at your solution I’m sitting here saying what if this thing doesn’t Implement as easily as you’re promising it what if somebody else in the business is is mad we chose to do this instead of that what if this thing doesn’t deliver the Roi you’re promising all of those Whata ifs now make it such that that buyer even though they agree that this is a problem we’re solving starts to walk themselves back from solving it right now and so when I categorize these into current state or future state it allows me to prescribe the right course of action to help with that objection if I just look at every objection as something to overcome I’m actually missing something that might be critical to understanding why my deal is getting stuck yeah I and I love the way you approach that because you’re focusing on getting closer to the buyer rather than creating that distance which you sometime sometimes can do right if you’re just trying to overcome the objection and you’re kind of playing that game right and Dean points on a comments hey no decision is a decision right and so your buyer wants to kind of go with status quo it’s we’re going to dig more into that so let’s go to the the second one on the list because I love that Jen but n ber two on the list of resolutions is for salespeople is the pipeline report and I’ve heard sellers lament that this is busy work and it’s is time they spend with their boss going through the pipeline and they see this as something that they’re just doing for their manager but your thoughts on this are super interesting because you’ve learned to ton by studying your pipeline report kind of in in aggregate rather than just the individual deals and pipelines in the combon report there that you’re seeing on the screen is something that our customers love about Insightly and and it’s a highly used feature but what are your experiences yeah look I’m not going to sit here and be like I was the sales Golden Child I was absolutely one of those sales reps who hated putting stuff in CRM and was like waiting till the very last possible minute until my manager was like Jen get it in there until I had a manager actually sit me down and say you are don’t do this for the company like you have to do that that’s part of your job but you’re missing out on how you can use it to figure out where you’re screwing up your deals and so I wrote a post on this a couple days ago on LinkedIn I’m not going to go through everything an entirey because it’s it’s long but effectively what I’m doing with my pipeline report is every January at least but I would encourage everyone to do this every quarter is go back look at your Clos lost pushed no decision deals so including there are the people that like December 31st landed us with the call me back in like January and we’ll talk about it put all those together and then start looking for patterns so patterns might be am I losing to a competitor or am I losing to timing budget price which are often just manufactured reasons for status quo look at things like when in the sales process am I typically losing and what I will share like when I started doing this it became really clear to me where I was screwing up my own deals so when I sat down and did this what I noticed is most of my deals were dying to either early stage no status quo like I wasn’t compelling someone that this is the right problem to solve and the right problem to solve right now or late stage indecision where they were bought in that this is a problem we’re solving but they looked at our solution were like whoa that’s a lot of horsepower I’m just going to do this simple thing over here so that was takeaway n ber one the second takeaway was when I looked at where I was losing in the sales process it was at that point when the champion was now ready to socialize it with the group and so all of these deals I had this like super happy Champion he’s like let’s do this let’s get this thing in motion and then all of a sudden the deal would completely fall apart well it forced me then to go back and look what am I arm that champion to go sell the rest of the buying group with it’s a bunch of solution collateral of course they’re not excited because they haven’t even decided that this is the right problem to solve they weren’t in those conversations so if I did not look at my pipeline report in that way I would never be able to pattern recognized like that so I think if we are good about putting the stuff in CRM which hey like no one loves doing it but if we know on the other side of it it’s a very clear signal as to what I can fix for this quarter this year all of a sudden like I don’t know that putting stuff in CRM seems like all that bad and I got much better at adoption yeah good so I I think it makes a ton of sense to me what you’re saying because there’s a certain amount of helping the the champion that you have understand is it a problem is it a problem that’s worth solving is it something that’s worth solving now and and if they can’t articulate that you’re probably blown out of the water yeah exactly so like so our Champions get happy ears just like we do right when they want to buy a solution what do they want to do they want to shop the solution around but what is everybody else in the buying group C dollar signs and if I’ve got a pet project on my side I’m gonna fight tooth and nail to make sure that you don’t get your pet project approved so that is all about problem alignment and making sure we get the group of individuals to collectively agree this is the right problem to solve yeah I I love your use of the pipeline report because it just shows how important curiosity is as a salesperson go to market teams as well I mean marketers just have to Simply dig into the data so let’s move on to point n ber three in resolution n ber three and so the most recent data I saw on this is from Gartner and it estimates that 40 40 to 60% of the B2B buying Journey end in no decision as we’ve talked about and and this means that we’re losing to that status quo more frequently than any other real competitor and you call the result of this COI or cost of inaction and I’ve been fascinated by this Dynamic yeah it’s it’s something if I had learned this 10 years sooner I would be on a beach somewhere chugging down a bottle of wine but instead I’m here with all of you lovely people so I think most of us have been trained to believe that our role as salespeople is to go in sit down with Chip and say Chip I see you have this problem let’s talk about the problem now let me tell you why our solution is the best possible solution to solve it and I’m going to dangle all these Roi figures in front of you to wow you with how good we are at solving this problem that’s certainly how I sold for the first years few years of my career then I learned about cost of inaction and what cost of an action tells us is h an behavior is such that in our personal lives at work doesn’t matter where we rarely make a decision to realize a benefit more often than not we make a decision when we feel like the risk of staying the same is so much greater than all the risks of changing so I share this example a lot some of you may have heard this from me before but like last March I got married and the six months leading up to my wedding I set my alarm every day for 5 AM to go to the gym guess how many days I went to the gym none and the reason for it was if my choice there was go to the gym or sleep in well sleep in is going to win all day long even though I have a compelling event I want to look good for my wedding pictures turns out I thought I looked good enough not my best but good enough but if I had gone to the doctor and the doctor said Jen you’re not going to make it to your wedding day because you’re lazy ass is at risk for a heart attack all of a sudden now my choices are heart attack or going to the gym what am I going to pick there and that’s what I mean by cost of an action we have to change the decision criteria for our prospects so that they’re not EV Valuing do something or do nothing it’s the Pains of same what does it cost you to stay the same versus the pain of change and this is where we also have to be really honest we love to make it sound like you push a button and Magic happens but buyers know that the road to Better is just absolutely littered with risk PE the idea that some people won’t change some people might be mad that we’re making them change these things competing prior it’s not easy to get better and so we have to as salespeople almost do like a seesaw exercise to say if I am honest about like implementing a CRM system there’s pains with that but have I made the pain of same big enough or alternatively is the pain of same actually big enough or am I trying to convince myself that this buyer needs us and my time might be better spent on another opportunity yeah makes a ton of sense because it’s not like the ROI of your solution isn’t important it just may not rise to the level of importance that the the buyer is ready to understand unless they truly understand the COI right exactly yeah the we had a fascinating guest on Closing Time Dale Harrison that talked about really D digging into the risk that’s in the buyer’s head right and he talks about the chance that you’re going to win a deal and then looking at it through a risk adjusted lens right so what’s your really your risk adjusted chance of winning a deal well the the fact is it’s going to be lower than it would be anyway right because that risk which you’re probably underestimating as a seller is gigantic in a in a buyer’s mind I love that so okay well let’s move on to the next resolution Jen this is great stuff by the way I’m loving it so a lot about email J I know it’s close to your heart and so Jen from your work at lavender. a but also in your work as a salesperson you’ve done a lot of email and you’ve really drilled into what works and what doesn’t so let’s talk about emails that really work and you have an attention span and we already talked about sort of the guards that the buyer has up so because as we discussed earlier the regul regulations are changing and it’s going to be a wakeup call for a lot of businesses so drill into this I I really love this idea here so I’ve had people come up to me and be like the the amount of fire you have for talking about cold email would make me believe you’re an SDR like why are you so obsessed with cold email but it’s because my belief and again another thing I wish I learned sooner in sales is that how you open a deal dictates how easy it will be to close it so before we get into this email let me play out what I mean by that if I send an email to a prospect and I’m like hey we got the best CRM in the world and all these companies use it and here’s the ROI they get and do you want to see it that buyer shows up to that first call saying all right let’s see what you got but I following my sales process I’m like no no no not yet first I need to ask you a hundred Discovery questions and all of a sudden we’ve created this awful friction and it’s one of the reasons why so many buyers will vote in those studies and say like yeah I want seller free experience because they promise one thing and then they make me do another thing so how we open a deal dictates how much we are actually going to be able to have an opportunity for Discovery and mutual discussion of the problem so what I used to do let’s say when I was selling Challenger Challenger is a sales methodology I would go in and I’d be like I noticed that you’re looking to grow by 10% this year and Challenger has the best Sales Training Method or sales methodology in the world and here’s the companies that use it and I thought it might be helpful to talk about how we could use it in your organization are you open to spending some time on it and then I get someone to show up and I would run my choreography of the first call and it would be like all right so let’s do a little Discovery all right cool you’ve got new sellers you’ve got people try you’re trying to sell an expanded bag all right cool now here’s how Challenger is going to help that and guess what they would do at the end of that call they’d be like that sounds cool but we got a lot of other things going on we can’t afford to have our sellers come off the line reason is is I j ped right into solution I never helped them understand or assess is the seller Talent skill level the problem worth solving and now I’m in a position as we talked about before where I’m like no no no no no you need to solve this problem because look at all these bad outcomes but it’s too late I’ve already lost that Prospect because now I’m trying to get them to change their mind and anybody who’s ever been in a sales cycle before knows the hardest freaking thing about selling is someone who’s already said no getting them to switch around and say yes because it involves them saying what you’re right I was wrong and it’s just not h an nature so all that to set this up if we look at the n ber of people in the market that are actually shopping for what we do and what we have to sell that estimate on average is between three and 5% but we always no I’m G to say always because I don’t speak in absolutes we often write most of our emails to those 3 to 5% now I not saying you cannot ever send an email about a solution that you offer if you have intense signals and Insider information that this company is looking at buying a new CRM like get them on the phone that’s fine but what I’m suggesting here and the example I am showing is that for most of us we don’t want to be brought in at the 11th hour because when I’m brought in at the 11th hour now it’s a price product battle off right I got I better hope I have the best product at the cheapest price or else I know I’m going to lose to that person so what this is called or what I kind of refer to this as is instead of solution prompting in your cold email which is like here’s what we have and how great it is this is problem prompting I am taking information that I have found about your business not about ours and forming a hypothesis about a problem you might have now I keep saying might for a reason because we don’t work within their four walls we cannot come in as an outsider and say I know you are because we don’t and it’s a great way to make us sound like we don’t fit in the room so in this email it’s taking a lot of the practices I’ve learned from lavender so really simple boring subject line This is this scenario is if I were selling Community management software Acme Community Acme is the prospect stupid boring that’s how internal emails sound we like that internal camouflage I’m getting right into in the preview text some something about my buyer notice I’m not starting with high I’m not starting with my name is I’m not starting with I noticed what we were trying to do is make this email as I we us eliminated as possible because we want the reader to feel this is about you not me so noticed your six months into your community job at Acme I can find that on LinkedIn but here’s where 1 plus 1 equals 3 not too I couldn’t find a community for Acme’s user so why would there be a job for Community growth if Acme doesn’t have a community maybe it’s because Acme is still in the process of weighing the pros and cons of do we build our own or do we just participate in others this is a hypothesis I am not certain of it AC might be releasing their Community tomorrow I don’t know that because I don’t work there but h ans love to correct if I show you I’ve used my brain and I’ve thought about what it’s like to be in your position more often than not buyers will reward that good behavior because they’re so used to bad behavior that is Thoughtless and irrelevant to them so now what I’m doing in the final line is I’m using social proof differently I’m not using social proof of like well we helped beta manage their Community to drive a 100,000 users because I don’t know that this is even a problem worth solving still a guess what I’m using instead is I’m saying Alpha was also in this situation they were weighing the pros and cons of building one because we are a community management software which you can see if you look at the title of my company and my signature line I’ll have to give you the whole description we have information that will help you make that decision for yourself so what I’m doing here is I’m not notice I’m not referencing software or anything here I’m simply trying to decide help that buyer decide is this the right problem you’re looking to solve and I want you to know that I can play a role in helping you think through that regardless of what solution you decide and so we end up becoming more of a problem problem consultant as opposed to a solution Pusher and if we go back and then I promise I’ll shut up because I know I’m on my high horse right now if we go back to that 83% stat we talked about where 83% of the buying group’s time is spent without the seller this is the exact thing that they’re looking to learn about they’re probably doing Google searches for like what’s the pros and cons they’re calling up their friends how did you decide it was worth the investment to build a community if we can add to that learning all of a sudden we’re creating pool instead of trying to push what I love about this Jen is all of these things like bring you closer to the buyer you’re kind of striking the inquisitive tone versus hey I know because my ears my eyes shut as a buyer when you tell me that my situation better than I do right versus this friendly hypothesis now maybe I’m G to engage with you because you feel like a consultant amazing I just muted myself because Mugsy wanted to bark so Chip and Mugsy we had a we had a question someone said well now sometimes systems will label emails external so maybe you can’t hide under those boring subject lines any thoughts there Jen yeah we’re not trying to be misleading to be fair I’m glad you asked the question because it’s an important point of clarification all we’re trying to do is mirror how the executive writes emails so if I write a subject line and I’m like 10 times Roi and up to 10,000 Community users I don’t even have to open that email to know that that is an email from a sales rep so it’s not about being sneaky because you’re right most of them have that banner up front that’s like external it’s just showing like how you write is often a movie trailer to how you talk and if I am talking all about our solution and using really salesy terms that buyer probably thinks that’s exactly how Jen’s going to show up at my call versus if I’m mirroring the way that they typically tend to write and communicate like I had a manager who I never once saw send an email that was longer than two sentences and that was a great sign for me because I’m like I can’t send a five paragraph email to him he’s never going to read it it’s the same thing with gold emails I I love this Jen great great tip n ber four people write it down okay let’s dig into our last resolution here so and it’s a big one so if you haven’t been convinced yet to invest or invest in your own personal branding especially on LinkedIn this is the year if you’re in sales being active on LinkedIn is no longer really a nice to have it’s a musthave we used to say hey if your ideal customer profile isn’t on LinkedIn it’s not as vital but with job changes the changing market and the fact that you can learn so much about your buyer you simply need to be there and you need to prove your ability to engage on social media media and so Jen this is how I found you frankly right I mean you started putting yourself out on on social media and and writing a lot I thought your your point of view was really compelling so that’s how we found each other as we were talking about this you talked about bullet point n ber two there social sparking versus social selling what do you mean by that yeah so this is this is my opinion and how I approach things by no means take this as don’t do this and do that this is just what has worked for me I’ve always struggled with the idea of reaching out to someone who’s on a social media platform to learn and trying to get them to buy it’s my own personal be like Beast I have to conquer so my Approach was to say if I am uncomfortable using social media to sell meaning like hit someone up in the DM and be like do you want to meet and that by the way that’s like totally bad practice and you should listen to Sam McKenna talk about it because she’s got really great ideas there and they work and don’t do what I would do my Approach was different in the sense that I I like the idea of social sparking meaning I am trying to spark my ideal customer with a problem and my understanding of a problem so if you look at my posts when I first started posting it was garbage I was just like here’s a research report and here’s a data point because I was too scared of someone being like your opinion is wrong I think it’s a barrier that a lot of us have as to why we don’t post socially because it’s really putting ourselves out there but that those aren’t our only two options what we all have as salespeople marketing people is insight into how prospects and customers think about problems we often underValue how much that Insight is helpful to other buyers so if you look at my content now a lot of my content is meant to spark a cro to say that’s this that’s literally the same exact problem we were just talking about in our team meeting yesterday so if I want to earn the right to get in with a sea level executive I don’t do that by posting here’s our product and how great it is now I sound like a sales rep I earn the right by saying like you’ll see me post about status quo losses to status quo and as a result even when I had my own bag as an AE I was getting tons of leads coming in for other people because the B the cro Who Never Once by the way commented liked anything I didn’t even know they were following me reached out and DM and said what I the way you just explain that problem is exactly why we we missed our Target last quarter can you come in and talk to us about it I’m not sure yet we want to look at a solution for it but we we come in and talk and I will take those meetings all day every day because that’s a learner that’s someone who does not already decided what they think they need how much they think they should pay for it that that is someone who is still figuring that stuff out so I can now shape demand in my favor through the course of those conversations any supplier who comes in after me is gonna have to unwind that and as we talked about that’s hard so that’s that’s how I got the nickname demand genen because I think we can build demand without wholly relying on marketing I think as sellers we have to enter in 24 thinking anything I get from marketing is amazing but I’m not going to rely independently on that I’m going to build some of my own too yeah and relative to social right I mean the the brand account is only going to get so much reach versus individual accounts the way that the LinkedIn algorithm Works you’re going to have huge potential reach especially if you’re focusing on teaching and showing your expertise and engaging those Learners a great question here from Travis that actually I don’t know the answer to he asked how helpful is it to get your LinkedIn account and verified J do you have an opinion on that’s relatively new yeah I did it because I’m a sucker I I don’t think there’s any like lift to it here’s what I will say I think it’s helpful from an Optics perspective I think we’ve all seen these like fake AI generated profiles that are not real people so I do think if you have a buyer clicking on your LinkedIn profile and they see that you’re verified it only helps them just realize like this is an actual person which is wild this is not something we had to worry about in 2022 but I think it just stands out and says this is a real h an being so I I would air on the side of doing it I haven’t seen like more reach or anything like that as a result yeah I mean if you have somebody that’s trying to connect to you and they have their shirt off and they have six-pack abs it’s probably not a real person it’s probably AI generated right so I mean who would use that as a professional photo anyway so the the the other bullet that I want to talk about here because I’ve lived this and one habit that I started this year is time blocking and I got that idea from a guest that we had on closing time our podcast and the guest is Mandy mchan and she talked about blocking an hour on your calendar every day so you actually do it in 15minute increments to react to posts comment on posts connect with other people especially if they’re in your ICP and post every day and just having it on your calendar is truly a game Cher and it’s super super important for me and I do I do it every day so any thoughts on that Jen do you do that also when I first started I did because like anything it’s a new behavior and if we don’t hold ourselves accountable it’s just way too easy to slip back into what we just talked about before status quo like I need to hold myself accountable I would do time blocking for making sure I wrote a post and I would put in my calendar here’s an idea that like I had when I was walking the dogs or in the shower so I’ve got something to make the the barrier lower to actually follow through on it but the second thing I did was I always want wanted to max out my connection limit when I was starting off on LinkedIn and so I would look at my Prospect list I would not only pick the decision makers of the individual accounts that I could identify I would also pick the end users so I could see what were the types of topics people were posting about I could reach out to people and be like when’s the last time you had sales training just out of curiosity and all of that would help me with my understanding of current state which would then help with my Outreach to the the senior decision maker so definitely holding yourselves accountable Through Time blocking is a plus yeah for sure and so yeah my my team pasted in that the link to that episode and highly re recommend you look at it you Mandy in the episode also drills into a sales Navigator which is an incredibly powerful tool and how to get the most out of that so highly recommend that episode we also had you mentioned Sam McKenna we had her on closing time and she has so many tips for using LinkedIn and sales navigator for getting doors opened and they released a ton of new features this in the past year LinkedIn has so if you haven’t been in there in a while be sure to get up to speed so the other area that we’re leaning into actually is job Changers we we we know from our research that about 30% of our demo requests for our software come from customer referrals and former customers and so we’re leaning into leveraging data on former buyers to try to find follow them if they left their company and they were a happy Insightly user let’s go find them at their next company and use them for outbound and the engagement that our sales team is getting on that outbound Outreach is Just Amazing Just very high open rates High reply rates and we leverage chifi which is a software vendor to help us do that kind of at scale is that a method you’ve used Jen oh my gosh if you look at where a large portion of my deals came from for a couple years there it was like I was blessing the fact that there was a short tenure for C and CMOS and and VPS of sales because I’m like great go somewhere else go somewhere else with the same problem that you need to solve so I just think five years ago if you didn’t know okay you can understand now we just have too many tools too much data too much available to us to make it an excuse that I I just didn’t know they left the company and went somewhere else so whether you’re doing it like High Jinky through Linkedin sales Navigator whether you’re using champy user gems any of those like have a process in place it’s just it’s money it’s like loow hanging fruit we’re just leaving for someone else to gain yeah I mean a lot of companies are now paying for sales Navigator because they think it’s so important and but I think a salesperson can consider it as part of the investment for the future anyway so if you’re not in there you definitely should be in there highly recommend and so those are our resolutions Jen these were this is a great list thank you for this We’ve listed them here again on the screen and hopefully you found some Value in it and with that I’m G to pass it back over to Val and feel free to chat in your questions yeah we do have some great questions I’m GNA give a quick commercial for Insightly though in the meantime so what folks give folks a couple minutes to get some more questions in so you’ve heard us talk about Insightly today it’s a modern scalable CRM that teams love we hear it’s very easy to adopt super customizable integrates with every other application you use to run your business best of all we hear from customers that they’re up and running within weeks and growing their revenue about 3x in year one customers also tell us they’re super able to impact key metrics using Insightly increasing pipeline sales velocity deal size and deal predictability yall saw that pipeline report it’s really really one area where Insightly shines Insightly is also super customizable those pipelines are dashboards reporting it makes it really easy to share C company performance within the company and to leadership up the chain as you need to and we’ve also found with automation that’s inherent in CRM you can save errors increase efficiency and really get more from your team as your business grows so if you’re considering CRM you think you might be over paying for CRM or just want more information go ahead and type demo in the chat and we’ll have someone from our team just reach out and give you a quick walkr of Insightly let’s get to some questions now although I’m pretty sure Jen’s hoping Chips Chips tenure CMO is short that’s kind of what I heard her say Chip so just be careful but we heard some Dean Le he chatted in and he used a cool phrase it was go to network so essentially he was saying that with that 83% of the buyer Journey really happening pre contact with a salesperson really working the network around that the the potential buyer I think was super interesting and I had never heard that term before yeah I think now with so many different point Solutions needing to integrate and I won’t even consider not me most buyers won’t consider something unless it works and plays nice with others there’s certainly that aspect of it but what I like about what Dean raised is we used to when we sold just sell into like a black hole I have no idea what this person’s learning about I have no idea what information they have in terms of their own beliefs and ass ptions where I think one of the biggest sweet spots is that’s still massively underleveraged by salespeople is communities so even if your buyer is not on LinkedIn or you think they’re not on LinkedIn I would still encourage you to go out and Google like slack communities or communities for and then put your stakeholder title there because what you will find is it is a gold mine of learning how does my buyer actually think about tradeoffs what are the types of questions that they’re asking for people with that title what are they eValuating what do they think is important I had a a lead come in so I sell sales or speaking engagements at sales kickoffs like I do Keynotes and stuff like that and I had a lead come in the other day and I was like I we’re not connected how did you find out about me and she’s like oh well there was a group of people in sales enablement Collective asking about sales speakers and your name was listed and I was like I didn’t even know that right so now I’ve gone in there I’ve Googled within the slack Community SKOOs SKO speakers SKO ideas and I’m finding too late because I’m a bozo all of these companies that were like Hey we’re setting up our SKO agenda we’re not sure should we do this or that if I had been smarter and gone in there in September I probably could have offered things like well here’s a a way to think about some topics that sales leaders really care about or your sales team probably is struggling with I could have been helpful which would have led to them saying all right who is this and so if I am not choosing to participate learn and observe the way that my buyers are going to learn the chances are very high I’m going to sound like an outsider so even if it’s just to look at them to say Let me let me learn how they talk what the words that they’re using there’s so much learning in that I think it’s inexcusable today for us to not take advantage of it so Dean thank you for raising that I love that next year you’re GNA do it better Jen so right GNA do it yeah you made a mistake once so next year you’re good so we also had a couple questions about Mugsy but I think I’ve deduced that that might be your dog so mugs is the person I keep in a cage over here he’s my gotcha mugs is my dog Mugsy is one of my four dogs fantastic all right well I think that’s a great place to stop if your qu question wasn’t answered we can we’ll reach out to you a member of the Insightly team I really want to thank Chip and Jen for joining us today I think I’m excited about the new year and I hope all those sales reps and sales leaders out there got a a big a good kick in the behind to get going for 2024 thank you so much for having me this is a blast yeah Jen thank you so much and thanks to everybody for attending today and have a great 2024 [Music]