Please find the transcribed webinar below.

Sonja Fridell: We’re from BrainSell. We’ll get started in just a minute here, allowing people to log on just for another minute. A housekeeping note, if you do have questions during this webinar, please feel free to put those in the questions box in the go to webinar interface. Again, we’ll start in just a couple of minutes. Thank you very much for attending our webinar on Seven Steps to Creating a Lead Generation Machine brought to you by Brainsell. I am Sonja, President and Account Executive here at Brainsell, and I’m joined by Deven Pearson, Business Development Manager and also a certified predictable revenue coach. Deven are you there?

Deven Pearson: I am Sonja, how are you?

Sonja: Great, thank you for joining. This is going to be a great webinar where we go through our growth processes here at Brainsell and how we handle lead generation and qualification. We wanted to share the wealth and make sure that people understand there is a process and a very pointed way to grow your business. That goes along with our mission. Our mission at Brainsell is to help grow businesses and transform them with technology and great tactics. That’s exactly what we’re going over today. We are based in the Boston area. We have locations all around the country and we really focus on process before technology. We’ve also grown about 30% year over year for the past eight years.

By the way, we’ve not grown our team every year by 30% either. We’ve grown a lot without having to invest in human capital. That’s exactly what we’re covering today. I’m going to start us off and this will be pretty pointed and brief, just some slides here. Some images of exactly the systems that we’re using and how we’re doing this. It’s going to be very interactive with Deven and I talking about the process and how we’ve implemented things internally. To start us off, the old way of doing things. Maybe this is how your business is operating today, but you might just have sales people that are doing it all. They’re doing your lead qualification.

They’re doing as many touches as they can remember to do to leads that come in from contact us forms, cold calling, you name it, trade show lists. It results in a giant mess. We were doing this eight years ago, seven, six years ago until we smartened up. It was too much, sales reps who are extremely valuable assets here because we tend to be architects to CRM systems and complex solutions. While we were spinning our wheels trying to call Joe Schmo who has a Gmail address that we don’t even know if he really exists. That’s a horrible waste of a high earner sales engineer type person should not be spinning their wheels trying to get Joe Schmo on a webinar, or on a demo.

That was the old way, doing it all, it was not growth ready. We maxed out very quickly, because we’re again from lead generation, to writing proposals, closing sales, and taking care of customers. There’s only so many hours in the day. 18 hours wasn’t enough, it just wasn’t. There is a better way. Our new way, yes, we divide and conquer. It doesn’t have to be all on one person from start to finish and this is the exact process that Deven’s going to step us through. Thank goodness for Deven, thank goodness for Predictable Revenue. This is a book that we picked up, four or five years ago, we picked this book up. It completely transformed the way that we were thinking. It completely transformed the way that we saw a sales organization and what it should be. We hired Deven and we locked him in a conference room for six weeks. [laughs] Not really.

Deven: Yes she did.

Sonja: I’m not really kidding. Deven spent about six weeks in that conference room and he learned a lot. Deven, I’d like to hand over the next few slides to you. Walk us through what this book architected for Brainsell and how you did it.

Deven: Yes, thank you Sonja. Like Sonja said, I was brought in after an extensive background in business operations and customer service and literally handed the book. The first thing I really learned was that it talked about specializing roles. Going back to the one person doing everything from lead genall the way through sales, all the way through account management. It highlighted the fact that you need to have an assembly line selling approach. Outbound focused efforts, and inbound focused efforts, and then customer service focused efforts. Those are the three legs that hold up the stool, the stool being the account executives.

The biggest takeaway immediately that I had from Predictable Revenue, that I knew was going to make the largest impact was following the old way that Ford came up and did things, which was the assembly line. You have this three legged stool. What are the three legs? We have an outbound team, an inbound team, and then a customer success farming team. The functions of those teams is to stay pointed in outbound lead generation efforts. From an inbound, you do your digital marketing, your SEO, and the entire point of those people are to take the heavy load off the sales people to qualify people that you’re speaking to, and walk them through the vision of the sale, all the way through to transferring of the relationship.

Again, the outbound team member — and we’re going to talk more about all the different steps here. Let’s go to the next slide, we’ll talk about the ideal client profile. The first step for an outbound lead generation is to define your ideal client profile. What I found was that a lot of the time we’re casting too big of a net where we should be using a spear. The spear is going directly after the profile that you’d like to sell into. This is pretty vanilla stuff, right? Number of employees, the revenue, geographic area, and the type of business. That’s really the B2B. Then there’s the prospect profile, so within those company profiles, then it’s the people that you want to speak to.

Decision making ability, pain points, budget, and that really outlines the first step of the seven steps is to define the ideal client profile, the ideal customer and prospect profile, that you want to do outbound spear efforts to, to guide them through and compel with content strategy. What does that look like? An outbound SDR strategy, once you have developed your ideal client profile, again, you don’t want to be spam emailing. You want to be able to go after very specific people that meet that profile. How that works is, this is called a deep dive 25 in the Predictable Revenue program. You look at five new companies per week that you’d like to sell into, make that ideal profile.

At each one of those companies, you choose five people, makes up of 25 new contacts per week. Then you compel with content and we’re going to get into what compel with content means. It’s a strategy that allows people to walk themselves through the lead life cycle which is typically being unaware of your product or service to aware. You do that with content, whether it’s an eBook, or whether it’s a comparison guide, or whether it’s a data sheet, or a cut sheet, or a one sheet, or whatever’s specific to your industry. There are steps throughout this process that are going to help bring people through that buying life cycle of a process. We’re typically unaware to aware. Then from aware to interested.

That’s another piece of content, which brings us to the next cycle. Then interested to evaluating, and evaluating to purchase. By the way, the days of writing these long drafted emails that nobody’s going to read, those days are really over. Much like when you hit a website, if you’re not getting everything that you need at the very top of that website before the fold, they call it, you’re not going to scroll down. You want to be able to capture the buyers’ attention as short and sweet as possible. Three sentences, a clear call to action, they call it the squint test. If you can back up and from five feet away, squint your eyes, and if you can still see your call to action, that means that somebody’s going to click on it.

Short emails, then spidering into a company. That’s why you choose 25 new contacts at five companies. You might call Joe and Joe might not be available. Being a good outbound rep, you’re not going to give up. You’re going to go to the next person and you’re going to find that basement window and you’ll find a way into the company because they’re your ideal client. Then comes the hot transfer. After you have done the work to identify your ideal customer profile, you have sent them short outbound emails with a compelling content strategy, then you are able to get on the phone and do what you do, have a conversation with people.

I think that that’s one of the most important things about outbound lead generation. It should be as educational as possible and it shouldn’t always be about the hard close. When the time is right to bring in somebody like a Sonja, that’s where the assembly line selling approach is taking place. So as an outbound lead generator, you are making the relationship, qualifying the person, making sure that there’s a good fit. Once you’ve identified that, it goes to a warm transferring. What does the warm transfer look like? A conference call. I don’t ever leave it up to our sales team to follow-up with a lead that I generate and I think we’re going to get into that more, but it’s more of a conference call, transfer of relationship, away you go.

Sonja: Yes and a little more on that. It’s very unusual that you call into a company and you get someone who’s pretty educated on the offerings and you also get immediacy which is, “Hey, I have Kevin sitting right here and he has clients that have done exactly what you’re trying to do. Do you have another five minutes? Can I just get him on the phone right now?” That’s literally how it goes here and my god, is that valuable, so valuable to have that immediacy and people love it. They love it.

Deven: Yes and to expand on that Sonja too is that because these prospects that you’re targeting are part of your ideal client profile, you don’t have to support this with any fluff. You’re going to be able to speak intelligently about their industry because you’ve helped like people in their industry scale their businesses in the past, so there’s no fluff here. There’s really no hidden secrets. It’s taking what you’re good at and using that to your advantage to have qualified good conversations with like business people that can benefit from your product or service.

Sonja: Yes and it goes across protocols, so I would use it like it’s not just a B2B play. We’re looking at a new heating system for my house right now, my husband and I, and I use this on her all the time. But yes, it’s tough and we’ve not had one great company. But guess what, the one person we’re probably going to go with, they’re the person who really spent the time to educate us on the different types of heating systems, on what would be good for us. They didn’t just give us a quote and walk away. We trust them. We trust that they’re knowledgeable in that industry and we’ve got a real sense of, “Okay, they know what they’re talking about. I’m going to go back to them.”

Because this is such a commoditized market in almost every industry right now. You can Google and find 50 other people that do exactly what you do. Why is someone going to go with you? What’s your value? From heating system to software if I know the product and I can really help you out with it and I’m going to gain your trust. It’s not all about closing the deal and making money and we really mean that. We really do believe that. We do have a great questionnaire that’s very topical, any tips for identifying contacts and getting contact information. We’re going to talk about that. That’s a great question but this is going to be in one of our next slides to have you played around with a lot of tools out there.

Deven: I found a lot that worked and I found a lot that didn’t and we’ll get into it.

Sonja: Yes, we will. Another overlying, just overarching whole point of this thing is don’t give up. We didn’t I think — What did it take us? Six, nine months?

Deven: Yes I would say after the initial six weeks of really grasping the process, it took — once we came in — and you can use the work perfected because just like you said, it’s going to be fluid and you can’t give up if something doesn’t work but when you find things that do, it took us, I want to say about six months before we really started to see a major increase of leads come in.

Sonja: Yes agreed. Don’t give up and try and try anything, test everything.

Deven: I talked a lot about the outbound strategy because that is really what my life has been now for the past three years or so and I want to hand it back to you Sonja to talk more about the inbound MDR strategy because this was your life for the longest time.

Sonja: Yes it was and when I, again, when I came on it years ago, there was this thing called inbound marketing and it was just starting and it’s how we all bought and I hopped on right away and that did skyrocket our lead gen and then we realized that we [laughs] had no one to handle all the volume of leads, the great problem to have and a lot of people are doing it now. You’ve got to try some different tactics. It’s not as easy as it was before but you’ve got to have a good targeted outbound strategy that doesn’t just run us through. You’ve got to have a good inbound strategy as well.

Of course, it’s going to depend on your business and what you’re doing but if you’re in kind of a commoditized market of sale software like what generally what we do, you’ve got to be providing value on the internet, you’ve got to be found and there’s so many different ways to do that and we’re going to get into tools and what we use in a couple of slides here. We’ll actually show you the tools that we use. But blogging, everyone’s always like why am I going to blog? Whatever is that? That’s silly. No, it’s not silly. It’s a huge Google spidering and SEO add-on for you that’s completely — can be completely free and a great low-cost than in your budget there. Blogging is providing valuable content to people who will find you organically online by Googling stuff. Then we could do a whole another webinar on this but –

Deven: Let me say because it’s so important.

Sonja: It really is and it’s forever changing. We talked about agile and fluid, this is just everything. It’s your approach to change about every six months with inbound marketing at least if not more, eBooks and forms. Don’t just blog for the sake of blogging. You’ve got to blog about something that you think your ideal customer profile, those people are searching for. What are they Googling for? Are they Googling for top — let’s take the heating system thing.

I was Googling most efficient heating system, most efficient HVAC system. There’s some really savvy HVAC guys out there. Then they came up and they have all these great articles but none of them had eBooks, none of them, and that means that I was reading all that information for completely free anonymously. They didn’t know who I was and they couldn’t capture my information. Unless I called them or filled out a contact us form that had nothing to do with their blog, they weren’t ever going to know who I was. They gave me awesome free information. Thank you HVAC companies from around the country, but they don’t know who I am. There’s ways to capture that information. Again maybe we’ll do follow-up webinar on that, but I’ll show you the tools we use.

The blog should be you’re educating someone and by the way, we have this great eBook that goes into massive detail on this topic. Why don’t you download it? That’s a lead. That’s an inbound lead, that’s free for you guys, free. We’ve got blog articles and eBooks up there from five years ago that people are still downloading and that took me this employee here so it was just a regular employee salary took me two-three hours to make. The thing is still producing leads. Webinars what we’re doing right now. Yes, we’re educating you guys but we also know who you are now. In complete transparency, we’re probably going to call you but these are great trust-building exercises, educational opportunities where we’re giving valuable content but we really care. You should be doing this to your client base or your prospect base.

The three minute rule, it used to be a five minute rule and we’ve changed that. You really need to get on the phone. When someone downloads an asset from your site, you should get an alert via email and one of your sales reps, your MDR, Marketing Development Rep, should be calling within three minutes. Then it used to be five but we find that three is way better. That shows that you’re incredibly responsive. We’re selling software, so people are always really happy when we call within three minutes because they’re like, “Oh, that’s cool technology.” Maybe if you’re selling HVAC systems, maybe you’d wait five or six, but no one really gets mad at us for calling so quickly. They’re more happy that someone cares. And then of course, nurture these guys with compelling content too just like your outbound spears nurture, your inbound spears should nurture too and there’re automated systems that will do this, so not just one follow-up from MailChimp saying thanks for downloading that thing, good luck. Maybe you drop them into a behavioral nurture campaign using an automation system and that can drip someone through the process of educating them further so that they are educated enough to buy.

Deven: Right and one little thing I will add here is that with your inbound nurture programs, or inbound strategy, that’s a little different, right? Because if you follow the compel with content, again bringing somebody from unaware to aware, aware to interested, interested to evaluating, evaluating to purchase, they’ve already become by themselves unaware to aware. You have to start that nurture program off of a different step, because you’re bringing them, again, and it’s a shorter cycle.

When somebody comes in, those are the warm leads that you’re getting and you’ve earned those leads through your thought leadership, your e-books, your blogging. Not only are you reacting to them faster, but because you are reacting to them fast and you’re giving them content that meets them half way, because chances are, they’re already half way of purchase no matter what the product or service is. You have to start that relationship off on a different foot than you would with an outbound strategy.

Sonja: Yes, absolutely. By the way, this is the net. You’re going to get what you get, just like when you dip a net in that water. You’re going to get– you’re going to get some minnows, you’re going to get maybe a bass and some octopus. You don’t know what you’re going to get. It’s not your ideal customer profile probably, and you’ve got a bunch of people out in the internet downloading stuff. This can’t be the only thing you do. It can’t be.

It needs to be the targeted approach, so that you’re spearing and you’re getting those ideal customers that’s what Deven’s doing. This is still low-hanging fruit. I’ll tell you, I closed one of the biggest deals about five years ago from someone downloading an e-book from us, who would’ve completely never known that they were around, but they were searching. It was a long tail keyword, and they downloaded an e-book, we called them and bang, huge deal.

That’s just a lucky one. But then on the same point, you might get some little onesie twosies out there. You don’t have to get good at disqualifying, but you’re going to get a net approach. You’re going to get a bunch of stuff and see what you get, and why not take it? We’ve also found that hiring new people is much easier, because you can get– you’re not cold-calling first of all. You’re really not cold-calling at all.

These people are — you’ve got maybe a freshie kid out of college who is real driven to make money and talk to people, and this is a great position for them because they’re calling people who are already interested, and it’s pretty low-risk stuff. This can be a position that you do hire a young kid that’s super friendly and driven, and compensation model could be another webinar for us. But we’re going to get into that a little bit.

We compensate SDRs, Sales Development Reps, and MDRs, Marketing Development Reps, twice. They have a base salary. It’s pretty low, because we have such an aggressive comp model on top of that. There’s so many different ways to get into good comp models to drive these employees, but we give them a stiff on transferring an opportunity to an account executive, with the account executive okaying that and saying, “Yes, this was a good opportunity. You get the $30, $40, $50” depending on how big we think the deal is.

They also get a percentage of the close. We’re going to get more into that. They get a small percentage of the actual close of the deal. This keeps these guys incredibly driven to find tactics to attract larger opportunities so they can make more money. If your SDRs and MDRs don’t want to make money, then they don’t deserve to be in that job, because these guys can make a lot of money. After MDR, SDR, account rep who closes the deal –

Deven: Here comes the third leg of the stool. Farming customer happiness. Like I mentioned in the beginning, my background comes from a extensive background in customer service, and this hits home to me is that keeping people happy, and keeping them educated, and not only educating them, but allowing them to educate you back, is going to help you scale faster than anything. There’s stats that support that.

We have just a couple here up on the screen. The probability of selling an existing customer. From bringing them from unaware through ready to buy. Maybe 60, or 70, but probability of selling — I’m sorry. Probability of selling an existing customer, going into your base, probably 60% or 70%. Probability of selling a new prospect, on average, the industry average is five. It can go as high as 20. We are around 15.

It’s so important to have a person that reaches out to your top customers, to all your customers if possible every quarter just to check in, say hello, remind them that you’re here to help them, educate them on anything new that’s happening at your company, and then listen to anything cool that’s happening at their company and become a trusted adviser. Cross-sell when it’s appropriate, but really the idea of customer happy, customer check in, farming, this is all about keeping people happy.

Building trust, and trust does equal referrals. Find that champion at the company that you’ve been successful with, and make them aware of all the cool things again that’s happening at your company. They will reciprocate, and then it’ll become more of a conversation. It’ll be friends and colleagues at that point, and you’ll start learning way more about your ideal client profile.

Our CEO here, Jim, well he says, “Two ears, one mouth.” The more that you listen, the more educated that you’re going to become, and then you can react to being educated from your customer and be able to add more value to them, because now you’re becoming an expert in their industry and helping them scale together as a team. That’s what’s it’s really about.

Sonja: Yes, that’s great stuff. Also, for this role, by the way, their title is obviously not farmer. Customer success, customer advocate, anything like that. We’ve hired customer success managers that we said basically, yes, you do get comped on some up sells, but your main your purpose is to check and see how things are going, and it could be an ugly job because parts of it are — by the way, you might call someone and they’re midway in an implementation and they’re not happy for some reason.

That person has a bit of a thick skin, but they’re also a mediator, because they’re like, “Those are customer success manager, I’m here–“, I know you might not — you don’t want to upset your account manager, or you don’t want to upset the engineer but, “I’m here to help. I will solve this for you.” Stepping away from making more money, this person ends up saving deals a lot of times, because they come in and the client is always so nice, but they don’t want to say, “Tony is doing a terrible job.”

This is the impartial party that sits there in the middle and just checks in and, “How are things going?” We have saved projects before with this. We all make mistakes, and sometimes, the customer is not being heard correctly by the account manager, implementer, or whatever it is you do. This is just a great — a bit of an insurance policy where you’re calling in, and just seeing how they’re doing and maybe you can catch them and save them. That’s incredibly valuable.

Also, I had a great example a few months ago of our customer success calling in to one of my clients, and hearing that they had a very trivial beef with the CRM solution that it was hard to do this thing, for example. He said, “I think there should be an easier way to do that. Let me talk to somebody, I’ll get back to you.” Great rapport, she’s listening, she cares, awesome. Already two gold stars.

Then, she comes to me and says, “Oh, they have the pain. There’s some tool whatever.” And I’m like, “It’s cancelled. It happens to be a tool that we use. This is awesome, great catch.” I wouldn’t have heard that in my conversations with them. They might not have opened up to me like that, because they think I’m busy, or they think I’m just calling with the projects. They really opened up to the success manager, and not only are they happier now, but they did buy the tool, so that is a win, win.

And they are happy, and it all started with an innocent call saying, “How are things going?” This is an incredibly valuable position, and I’m telling you, if you want to raise revenue now, if you don’t want to stand up the other two legs of the stool right now, if you came to me and said, “I want to grow my business 20% over the next six months through December” I would tell you to hire a customer success manager, because these stats are true.

It costs five times more to attract a new customer than keep an existing one. It’s 10 times easier to close an existing customer a new business. If you’re not already doing this, you need to.

Deven: And just to add one more stat there. Like Sonja you said, that this sometimes uncovers unhappy. Even though the person’s role is to be customer happy and keep people happy, there are sometimes that through calling into your customer base, there’s going to be problems. If that problem goes unresolved, those people are going to turn around and tell 10 people about it. Now, it goes the other way.

If you nurture your client base and you become a trusted adviser, they’re going to go out and tell 20 people about it.

So, word of mouth should drive a good chunk of your inbound business, inbound for your MDR to triage. Keeping people happy is going to, like Sonja said, it’s the fastest path to cash really if you don’t want to invest in the three-legged stool, the farmer, the customer happy person can keep the stool, the AE stool up by themselves.

Sonja: Yes absolutely and referrals that is an old school — I used to think, “This is old school to call people up and say, “Hey Jim, can you give me two referrals”, and that that is old school but guess what? When you solve that problem for someone, I’m going to go back to my customer say like, ” I’m so happy we could solve that for you, that’s so great. Have you got any other friends or buddies that you have that have the same problem? Can you think of any?” There are cooler ways to say that after you’ve really delivered.

Once you deliver, then people will be happy to give you the referral. If I save 50% on my heating costs and the job goes impeccably and they ask, for sure I’m happy to refer out but it’s got to go well and they’ve got to care. This is stuff that you probably know but it’s worked amazingly.

Deven: One other thing to add here, not only is it the referral and not is it building the champion, but this is also for case studies. “Sally, we’ve helped you here solve your huge problem that you expressed to me. In return, would you mind if we do a quick case study?” Then that turns into marketing collateral using some longtail SEO on it, you throw it up on your blog, you fill it up on your website, all of a sudden six months from now when people are experiencing the same issue, you’re going to come up on the google and they’re going to come to your inbound and the entire cycle starts over right to the MDR.

Sonja: It’s a beautiful thing. It is. I love that and also if you have multiple things that you sell or multiple angles that you can work into a company, this is a great way to start building that customer database of contacts at that account rather. We sell accounting systems, a lot of our CRM customers don’t know that. But when the customer success calls in, we say, “By the way Nancy, what accounting system are you using? Cool. Do you know that that can integrate or do you know that we do XYZ? Can I talk to your accounting person?” This is, again, building that rapport to help the customer in other areas, if your business model lends to that of course. It could.

Don’t let your leads flyaway. What happens when you have all these leads? You’ve got all these leads, how do you keep salespeople accountable for closing deals? There’s actually a pretty interesting self-supporting method that we use internally here and that is part of Predictable Revenue that can help you. Sales meetings. They sound trivial and boring but they’re not. They encourage collaboration and they encourage accountability.

Every Thursday, we need as a team and we have some virtual team members, we do a go-to meeting, we show our CRM and we go through top closing ops that are going to close that month and we very quickly, we try to keep it under an hour. We go through them very quickly and each account executive has their time where they go through. In that list view and CRM by the way, we have a created by and the person who created the opportunity is the MDR SDR who created the opportunity and transferred it over to the account executive.

We see who created the lead, that’s great, we have those metrics too that will share with you after here. I might be going through my deals and Deven has on his dashboard all the leads he’s created for me or opportunities rather and he says, “Sonja that’s great but you didn’t talk about XYZ company, how’s that going?” He caught me. “I’m behind on that one. I’m really sorry,” or they haven’t responded, “Can I give it back to you Dev? Can you get them? They’ve really gone quiet. I need some help on this, I’m slammed.” because the comp model encourages this.

Deven gets a percentage of the deal that I close. He’s always going to be on top of me for closing deals, it’s self-supporting. Again, your salespeople, your MDR SDR Account Executives, they have to like money or in they’re in the wrong profession. If you’re not driven by revenue and making money, then you need to do something different because this model encourages people to make lots of money and that’s what you need and that’s what your ads can say when you’re trying to hire people. Deven, anything else to add on this, sales meeting?

Deven: Other than I love Thursdays because like Mike Slingy said, “I can sit back and I have my list of opportunities that I have transferred for the week and I can make sure that all of them are being addressed, that they’re all being followed up on adequately and help identify any hole.” Again, it brings it back to the assembly line selling approach. If Sonja has reached back out to a prospect and I’ve already done a warm transfer too and she hasn’t been able to get them back on the phone or engage in the meeting or the next step never happened, she shouldn’t waste her time chasing that down.

That should come right back to me and it’s not that I’m going to get compensated twice from the qualification, but that’s not the point, the point is is that I’m freeing her time up to do what she does best. It goes back to me doing what I do best which is get people on the phone and make sure that they’re a good fit. It’s actually fun, I take off my business development hat, I throw on my sales manager hat and I’m able every single week to make sure that not only are we chugging forward as a team and as a company, but if there’s anything that I can help my Account Executives with that I am able to aid them in keeping them focused, in keep them on point and I go back to doing what I do.

Sonja: Yes. Awesome. So much stress off the salesperson to not chase dead leads, that’s great. What do we use? Well, we use a bunch of tools and we have the pleasure of using a lot of different things and we’ve tried a lot of different things. Right now we’re pretty very pleased with the stack that we have right now and they’re all integrated, how many people can say that? What do we use? Well, list building. Joel your question on list building. God, we use a lot of different things, Hoover’s, Inside View, RainKing is a bigger tool much just like for technology companies really, technology focused companies.

We’re trying a couple other things. We find that a lot of the data is pretty similar. A real targeted approach though would be your deep dive 25 that Deven was talking about. I encourage you guys to, if your SDRs can pick a top five companies that they love or that think would be a great fit for your product, pin those up on a post a note and don’t go into Hoover’s, you could go into Hoover’s to find them but just go into LinkedIn and look who works at that company and call them.

Deven: Yes, good point.

Sonja: Go on Facebook and see what they like to do and do that way. You don’t always have to go to a list to get qualified people, you can go on LinkedIn, Google call in find the right person. For the big list, it’s the Hoover’s or RainKing kind of deal.

Deven: Just to add a couple things there. Joel, I found that there are different platforms that are going to complement your ideal customer profile. The first step is to understand where you want to go after specifically and then from there, you are able to choose the right tool for you. Hoover’s in general is a good tool that will give you insight into industry. As you’re building out your profile, you can use a tool like Hoover’s to help you build your compelling content. But then you can use a tool like InsideView, Lead411, RainKing.

Like Sonja said, LinkedIn is a huge asset when you’re just trying to identify if you’re going after the right people. I also I’m active on Twitter and even though it’s just hashtags and it moves fast, if you follow using a tool like TweetDeck, if you follow the right hashtags or the right trending, then you’re going to be a forward thinking and you’re going to be able to start reading compelling content that is edgy and and it brings people through that buying cycle really the way that capturing them midstream.

Sonja: Yes. Or you could use Act-on instead of TweetDeck or Hoot Suite. Act-on. Things go from lists to marketing automation. Marketing automation can hit on SDR and MDR, it’s mostly in MDRs or marketing developments duty to have a marketing platform where they can send out emails, track people’s behavior and nurture them, get them to webinars, get them to events. That’s what we use, we use Act-on, telephony integration. We use Tenfold, this is so incredible groundbreaking product. When we make outbound calls, first of all you can click the dial and a little screen pop happens that allows you to take notes, see the person’s social profile right there, see what else you’ve done with them in the system or other people and it automatically will create a held call record in the CRM.

It doesn’t have to just be Sugar, they also work with Salesforce and Dynamics and all the leaders. That makes our sales teams really, really effective. We also get data from that, so we can see how many people are making calls, when they’re making calls, when they’re connecting, it gives us the data to make our sales team more effective. Then on CRM, we are one of Sugar’s top partners. We use them. Our system is tweaked to completely fit this process.

It’s simpler than you think it would be. We don’t really have many workflows or no customizations to support this. It’s all behavior based, delete and some lead routing, but really incredibly basic stuff that we’ve done.

Deven: Three fields.

Sonja: Yes.

Deven: Great. Just three.

Sonja: 3,000 fields, that’s it. Yes. We can do another webinar on the exact stack, but this is the process. Then Clicdata, we use for BI. We’re able to take data from our accounting system, excel sheets, Google Analytics, Act-on, Sugar and we’re able to mash up gorgeous reports and dashboards that you can then use as your KPIs which we’re going to go into next. Again, this is the stack, pretty simple but a tight integration between all these products that, by the way, they’re all out-of-the-box integrations. We haven’t coded anything for these integrations to happen, no coding necessary.

Learn how to fly this thing blind. You’ve got to be able to go on vacation, Deven’s got to be able to take a day off, which he sometimes does. That’s all right. This is a picture, and there’s Tenfold. There are KPIs, there are tools that you can use to actually understand where you’re at deeper than the CRM, just the CRM can show you. Right here we see a really cool KPI dashboard of performance over years, sales distribution, then if we can split it up by region or by rep. This is stuff that you can get in the CRM but you’re going to have to pull seven different reports and that’s a drag.

We use this tool where we can dynamically change reports and filter and see everything at a glance, and this pulls in data and it acts as its own data Mart. It hooks in with Sugar, Salesforce, QuickBooks, NetSuite, Google Analytics, like I said Act-on, you name it. You can mash up reports. Think of now you can see a dashboard of your revenue and how much you are up here, what you are up in sales or down in sales and how does that compare to your lead gen, how does that compare to customer attention, deals that are closing around the world. It’s completely up to you what you you want to see.

We need other things too. We need other KPIs that are coming straight from the CRM. We personally here we use a difference of these click data to mash up reports across different databases and see things all in one screen. This is an example of a Sugar dashboard that comes directly from Sugar. This is just straight CRM reporting and Deven has made a really incredibly valuable dashboard. Deven, do you just want to walk us through quickly some of these overlying reports here and what they mean.

Deven: Absolutely, thank you. Again, this is all about lead generation. You want to be able to measure your new inbound leads by source. What’s performing the best? Where do you have to pivot if things aren’t working? You should be able to look at that and judge what your next month strategy is going to be based on what’s performing this month and last month, total working by qualifiers, inbound and outbound.

Again, I want to be able to sit back as a business development person and monitor progress of my Account Executives and if I see that somebody’s overloaded or somebody’s light, then I want to be able to make adjustments to make sure that my leads get rather rounded off easier. MQLs, Marketing Qualified Leads, those are your inbound. Again, those are your blog contents, your webinars, your longtail SEO efforts, anything that’s coming inbound mature MDR is going to be qualifying SQL, Sales Qualify Lead outbound.

Cold call, cold email, those are the ones that are going to be more of a targeted approach. Again, inbound is going to be your net, outbound is your spear, then outbound automated programs for your spear techniques. Who is in the current nurture program? And having some kind of a trigger that through behavior based on that nurture program, it then alerts you that whether it’s a lead score or a click-through or whatever it is that you’ve made that threshold, being able to monitor that and know when to react. Then sales performance including one lost average deal size and conversion rates.

This is pretty vanilla stuff that the way a business scales is that you have to increase the amount of leads, you have to increase the average deal size and you have to be able to convert more. That’s how you are going to be able to scale scale scale, is that you’re giving valuable content, bringing people through their buying decision, getting bigger deals, more deals, better conversion because your sales people are left to sell, your qualifiers are qualifying. All of that together is going to make the company scale.

Sonja: Awesome, that’s great. If you have a goal, we always encourage setting goals. If you have a goal, you can back into a number. If you’ve got your average deal size, then you can back into a number of, okay, these are how many leads we have to create and then we’re going to qualify these many leads. Each lead is going to convert to this much and now you can back into your growth goals of the company. You need the data.

A very quick recap here on the seven steps: you’ve got to define your specialization roles, you’ve got to have the MDR, SDR account reps, any number of that depending on your size. You’ve got to define your ideal client profile, you’ve got to get insight into companies and contacts through list building and other tactics. Identify the right technology stack that works for you and that is not too manual because this thing could takeoff and you don’t want to have the wrong tools when it does. Compel with content, qualify and transfer and they’re going to trust your company already, keep those clients happy and educated with a customer success manager. Then get your metrics and fly that plane and go on vacation.

Are you ready? Yes, you knew it was coming, we can help and we have the ability to help because we’ve been doing this for a long time. I’m going to launch a poll right now, if you guys are interested in having a personalized walk through with Deven or one of our other coaches here to see where you are now and what you can do differently, take advantage of that. We will look at the marketing strategy, the technology stack that you have in place, your sales process, your people, how you compensate them and also analytics.

Analytics on what are your benchmarks, do you have them, do you have the ability to get them? Then there are tools manual and paid that will manage that. We’ll hang on the line for a bit more. If you do have questions, please put them in the question box and we’re happy to help. Thank you very much for joining us today on this webinar. Deven, thank you so. much. This has been really useful. I’m glad that we could finally get it together to share this magical process with others. Thank you.

Deven: Thank you and I hope to hear from some of you and my line, my email is wide open. If I can help in anyway with any of the questions or any of the points where anybody saw here today, just give me a call, we’re here to help.

Sonja: Yes we are and thank you Deven. We also have online chat, it’s as easy as going to the website and we’ll chat with you. That concludes it for today. Again, thank you everyone for joining. We will send a follow-up with the recording and some other things. Have a wonderful day. Thanks, Deven.

Deven: Thank you Sonja.