Pipeline Power Hour - Spring 2023
Join Ian Faison, Founder & CEO of Caspian Studios, and five pipeline powerhouses in back to back quick hit sessions where they’ll share their playbooks, hot takes, and best secrets in key marketing channels.
Welcome to the spring 2023 pipeline power hour.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios
and the host of pipeline visionaries.
And today over the next hour,
we are going to dive into five channels
with five experts to hear their playbooks
for generating pipeline.
We're gonna talk about AI,
unlearning the marketing funnel,
top three outbound marketing plays,
driving brand engagement,
and driving pipeline with direct mail.
So buckle up, get your notebooks ready.
These sessions will move fast
and we're gonna cover a lot of ground.
Start doing those calf raises, get your mocktails ready.
Let's get into it.
First up, Nina Butler, talking about AI.
Pipeline power hour.
Nina Butler, head of marketing, redg.ai.
We're talking AI.
Nina, how are you?
- I'm great, Ian.
I'm so happy to be here this morning.
- So excited to have you today.
Let's talk AI.
Obviously we've seen an explosion
over the last few weeks and months.
Tell me about what do you think the landscape is
for AI right now?
- Yeah, so the great question,
it's a seeming overnight sensation,
but an actuality generative AI technology
has been being worked on for decades.
But it's only with the introduction of Chachi BT,
which I'm sure is a household name at this point,
has it really kind of captured mainstream attention,
which I think gives this false sense of illusion
that this technology sprouted up overnight.
But that's far from the truth.
And when I kind of think about
what the landscape looks like today,
I think about it in two different axes.
The first axis is you have models
that are very generally applicable, right?
Open AI is what powers Chachi BT,
and that makes it very good for kind of
the everyday use case.
You may have a list of ingredients in your fridge
and you want to figure out a recipe to create.
A general model like Open AI is going to be great for that.
But then you start to have your other end of the spectrum.
And those are models that are starting to be trained
in sales speak, in messaging speak, for marketers, right?
And that's what I think is really relevant
for our conversation today is if you're a revenue professional,
if you're looking to build pipeline
and you're thinking of generative AI can be a way
to help boost that productivity and improve those outcomes,
those are the models that are going to give you
better outputs to meet your buyers.
And then the second thing worth kind of mentioning
when you think about the landscape as a whole
is what are the use cases, right?
Are you looking to create sales messaging?
Are you looking to create blog posts,
social posts, Amazon product descriptions, right?
There are all these different flavors
that generative AI tools are taking right now.
So it's really important you kind of pick the one
that's going to be the best fit for you
in your go-to-market motion.
- Yeah, it's so interesting.
I mean, obviously,
y'all at Reggie are doing this by saving time
with personalized sales emails using AI.
And that's something that like is so obvious.
I mean, it's like one of those things that you see at
and you're like, of course,
this is like the best use case ever
as a former salesperson,
sitting there writing personalized emails
is about the worst thing you can possibly feel
like you're doing, but it's so critical and important.
So like clearly we see the use case for sales,
clearly we see the use case for marketing,
that having this superpower technology at our fingertips,
obviously some people are nervous about this
and how it shapes, but generally speaking,
it seems like this exponential technology
is gonna be put at the hands of humans
and allow us to do our work better.
- It's totally right.
When you think about what is the role then of the human
in this technological evolution,
well, the human still plays a really critical part
to that experience, right?
And you just talked about AI can help us be great at things
that humans are not trained to be great at naturally, right?
We're not great researchers on day one.
We're not great writers on day one.
And when you kind of think about the requirements
of a sales professional today, the job description,
even though it's sell, sell, sell,
it's actually this litany of things you have to excel at, right?
And so AI can help circumnavigate some of those
more manual tasks to give you more time back in your day
to be what you're great at,
which is a relationship builder at the end of the day.
- Yeah, what are some of the things that y'all are seeing
at Reggie that is really at the cutting edge,
that are things that marketers or sales teams
are able to use right now?
- Yeah, it's a great question.
When I think about sort of the evolution
of messaging, if you will,
when you think back decades ago,
it was really marketing driven language, right?
It was one to many, it was trying to appeal to as many people
as you can with some sort of templated blanket communication.
But then you had the emergence of sales engagement platforms
like the Outreaches of the World,
the Sales Offs of the World,
and that really started to take that one to many
down to one to few, right?
It was persona based, templated language.
It helped greatly scale your outreach,
but your ability to personalize dwindled over time.
And so now we're in this really beautiful intersection
of where human meets computer,
and you can actually start to personalize at scale.
And I think the concept personalization at scale
has been kind of dragged through the mud over the past decade.
Everybody's claimed they've done some version of it,
but only with new technology,
can you actually start to create personalization at point?
And when I say at point,
that's like true one to you messaging,
like hyper-researched, hyper-personalized
and personal outreach to an individual at a company,
and at scale, which is still allowing you
to leverage sequence and kind of templated emails,
making sure you're infusing personalization
at those right moments in time.
So when I think about what's kind of cutting edge,
it's that you can have your cake and eat it too.
You don't have to sacrifice scalability,
but you can still provide almost an AVM experience
to all accounts, not just your tier ones
and not just your top prospects anymore.
- Yeah, and what are some examples of ways
that that stuff is so personalized?
- Yeah, I can give you a great example
of how AI kind of helps enhance that overall experience.
So specifically speaking to our own SDR team,
they utilize Reggie to help shortcut
what we call a three by three workflow,
which has become very popular
in terms of sales methodology.
The intention behind the three by three
is how can you find three pieces
of relevant personal data points on your buyer
to then help craft a personalized message
in under three minutes?
Even the best irreps, that can take upwards
of 10 to 15 minutes, right?
To do all that reconnaissance, pull in the right data points,
and then not just use it to say like,
hey, ENC, you work at X Company,
thought you might like my product,
but really take it that step farther
to kind of wow the prospect or wow the reader.
All of that is streamlined with AI.
So all you have to do is open up your sales engagement platform
and that email's already been created for you.
And I think the real example here
is it finally puts sellers into the editing seat,
not into the constant content creator seat,
which I'm sure many folks listening in today
would much prefer to edit a piece of content
than to stare at a blank white screen
or with bracketed tokens that say personalized here
and you're sort of like,
I got 20 personalized emails to get out today
or I have two ADM campaigns to stand up.
This is really like the cognitive load required
is very intense and now it's not with technologies like AI.
- Yeah, and ultimately like we know that the best reps
in the world are the ones that can create
the most personalized experience that listen the most,
that try to get as much information from the person
to be able to solve their problems
to make sure that it's right fit.
So it only makes sense that giving those type of people
superpowers is obviously, we always say superpowers,
but it's the easiest way to talk about it.
Superpowers is really gonna help them do it a lot faster,
but for the folks that might not be that good at that,
going from that writer's block moment
that just staring at the screen to,
hey, I have a 90% solution that now I just need to edit
is like our dream come true.
- Well, it's right, you have,
you can make great reps phenomenal,
but then you can take mediocre reps and make them great,
right?
It doesn't matter what your familiarity
is with personalization or what your predefined skill set is,
you can either go from zero to 50
or to get from that 50 to 100 if you're like,
I know how to personalize,
but I wanna make sure that I am getting an A+
on every email I send out.
AI can now start to read it and just performant data
and localize data to your audience to figure out
like what are the exact words and value propositions
and personas that are gonna net you the best outcome.
And now you can start to optimize to that.
And that's a level of insight that sales engagement
providers don't provide, right?
You see superficial things like opens and clicks and replies,
but it tells you what's going on,
but not what you're doing to inform the output, right?
And so that's really when AI can start
to be super helpful for frontline teams.
- Yeah, I think if you sat down with the CRO
and you said what's the number one thing
that you wanna do to say,
hey, if I could make all of my below average reps,
you know, average or above average,
that'd be number one.
But the thing that they've never been able to do,
which they actually wish and they say all the time is,
I wish I could just duplicate my best reps, right?
I wish I could just clone them.
And it's like, yeah, you can't clone them,
but if you can make 20% more productive,
like you said, if you can say,
take a 15 minute email and make it a three minute process,
like it's not doubling, that's, you know, math, 5xing.
- Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, really exciting. Any other thoughts on sort of
this AI conversation and being, obviously, you know,
this is, we're talking about it from a sales perspective,
but there's all sorts of sociotegal ramifications,
which we definitely can't get to here in 10 minutes.
But any other thoughts on how the proliferation
of AI tools is happening?
- Yeah, I would say, as a word to the wise, again,
no matter what seat you are currently in
as a revenue leader or individual contributor,
do your homework, right?
Understand much like all new technology,
it solves problems, but then it creates opportunity
to solve things in the future, right?
And I think that we're at this intersection right now
where we have all this great tech at our disposal,
but now the reality is how do we put it into our workflows,
right? How do we introduce this into our marketing motion,
our sales motion in a way that's actually gonna give us
that productivity lift?
So I guess my final parting thought for everybody listening
in today is make sure that you're understanding whether
you rely on your marketing team to create
all your go-to-market content or your frontline reps
or more times than that, it's a content committee
and somewhere in the middle that you're understanding
what all those checks and balances are
and then how to infuse integrated AI into a way
that helps you get better, faster and farther together.
- Thank you, Nina.
Next up, we're gonna be talking about
unlearning the marketing funnel with Sydney Waterfall.
Pipeline, power, hour, Sydney Waterfall,
SVP of growth at refined labs, how are you?
- I'm doing great.
That was a hype up intro, I like it.
- Yeah, we're not messing around.
It's power hour, people are doing pushups, ripping shots.
It's a crazy day here with Qualified.
We're super excited to have you on the show.
We're gonna talk about unlearning the marketing funnel.
Obviously the modern buyer journey has changed completely.
How do you think it's changed?
- Yeah, I think the, there's a lot of assumptions
that we make with buyer journeys.
We assume we know people
and what their buyer journey should look like
and then how it should map into a funnel.
We kind of try to reverse engineer that.
But it's a lot of based on assumptions
and obviously buyers have changed a lot
in the last few years and will continue to rapidly change.
So, I mean, when I think about the buyer journey,
I like to focus on using first party data
when I think about the buyer journey
rather than other types of data sources out there.
So, I look at it as not in buying mode,
which I can go into subcategory there
and then in purchasing mode.
So, not in buying mode,
underneath that huge bucket,
which is gonna be the majority
of probably your total addressable market
that you're going after.
I wanna look at are they brand engaged, right?
So, when I mean brand engage,
are they actively like telling your brand,
I wanna hear from you and letting you
kind of distribute content to them
in those different mediums.
And then in purchasing mode,
I think about it is they're researching your solution,
your product, pre-declaring intent,
and then once they declare intent,
AKA, raise their hand, say,
"I wanna have a sales conversation."
That's kind of post-conversion
and then you have a lot of journey over there
and then you've got convert demand, expand demand.
So, those journey is huge. (laughs)
- Yeah, I like to think of it as like buyer's journey
and learner's journey, right?
Where it's like this learner's journey of,
and they sometimes overlap,
but sometimes they're very different
and I love the way that you phrase it there
where it's someone who's not looking to buy
that are they brand engaged?
Because at the end of the day,
if they have no idea who you are
throughout that entire time,
it's gonna be really hard to convince them
to take a sales meeting when they flip the switch
and say, "Yep, I'm ready to buy now."
- 100%.
- So, if the funnel is out, then what's in?
- Ooh, this is a good one.
So, you really don't see any like persona-specific
kind of funnels anymore
or at least I don't really believe
in like persona-specific funnels.
So, I like to think about, like I said,
not in buying mode, buying mode
and then once they actually convert,
how we measure it is we understand how they're converting.
So, we call this concept pipeline sources
and if they're declaring intent,
we call that a pipe conversion,
goes through a pipe framework
and we're understanding, okay,
they converted, raise their hand, qualified meeting,
high intent revenue opportunity and close.
The other way we're looking at that
is other ways that they convert.
So, maybe they converted through outbound
or through an event or through a,
maybe like an AVM or intent triggered outreach
that was personalized and came in that way.
When we look at the same type of things
across all of those pipeline sources,
which is going to be the conversion,
the meeting, the high intent revenue opportunity
and then obviously close one.
So, that's the simplified funnel that we like to look at.
- Yeah, so sort of digging in there a little bit
into those measurements.
If someone were to be a listener of the podcast, for example,
or comment on something on one of your social posts
that's in your buying persona,
like what is that measured as?
- Yeah, so I would say that it's categorized
in not buying mode and we look at brand engaged.
So, brand engaged could be they would sign up
and learn from our brand.
So, you know, you can't, I don't think it's really realistic
to get out and measure every single social media comment.
It's great that you're seeing those comments come in.
That's like a lot of the qualitative feedback,
but we want people to attend our events,
sign up for our newsletter, give us permission
to proactively distribute content to them.
And obviously we execute on a lot of dark social platforms
and we run a lot of kind of dark social content distribution
methodologies so that we can drive people
to becoming brand engaged.
- When you say dark social, what is that?
- Yes, dark social.
So, dark social as a concept is
where you would educate and distribute content
on platforms and channels that cannot be tracked
by traditional software, attribution,
and also don't create third party intent.
So, think of podcast platforms like YouTube, Spotify
and Apple Music, right?
And also think of communities, private communities,
social media, DMs, things where you'll never be able
to actually capture a trackable touch point
to the individual person.
All of that is considered dark social.
- Yeah, so for example, when I see one of
Chris Walker's videos on LinkedIn
and I DM it to someone on our team and go,
oh, hey, this is awesome.
He said this on revenue vitals.
Like you have no idea that I did that, right?
Like you have no idea that Ian engaged with this thing.
And there's no way to know that right now,
but I am in fact now, you know, brand engaged.
- Yes, and you know, you can't measure all of brand engaged.
We rely on hybrid attribution and self-report attribution
to really understand how are these programs
like podcast and LinkedIn and how are these even YouTube?
Like YouTube shorts were pretty heavy in.
How are all of that actually contributing
and impacting our funnel?
So spoiler alert, podcast makes up the highest percent
of revenue for our business and has the highest win rate
from conversion to close one.
So great channel for us.
- Yeah, I mean, you're preaching to the choir
because Caspian does podcast service.
So obviously love to hear that.
But that's what we see as well, right?
Is like these very human centric type shows
work really well for that.
And it's interesting that you spoke about
a self-reported attribution.
So we actually started doing this at Caspian
based off of y'all's advice.
I forget maybe a year ago.
And guess what?
A ton of our ad words that we were paying for
when the person put where they found out about it,
it wasn't Google, right?
It was, it was, "Hey, we listen to your podcast,"
or, "Hey, it was a referral from a friend,"
or something like that.
And if we hadn't had done self-reported attribution,
we would have thought that all those leads
were people searching for it in Google
and it turns out that they weren't.
And I'm like, "Huh, that's pretty fascinating."
And so I thank you so much for coming up with that
and evangelizing the self-reported attribution.
- Yeah, 100%.
We learn, it really depends on your persona,
but we learn so much from that field
because people will put in like four things.
I started following so-and-so on a personal brand,
then I started following your actual brand,
then I listened to your podcast
and then I saw you present at this event.
And you're like, "Okay, the journey's not linear,
but at least I'm getting insights
into how people are consuming
and interacting with the content."
- Yeah, and if you're using like a listening tool,
maybe that stuff comes up in your sales conversations
and that's great, obviously great too.
And hopefully you have both of those things,
but self-reported attribution shows you
at least a little bit of a glimpse.
And one of the things that y'all talk about
is making it a mandatory field,
which is any mandatory field is always a no-go
in marketing world,
but I think it's just given us a lot of insight there.
So I think it's something really interesting.
Any other final thoughts on pipeline
as it relates to not having a funnel
or this new sort of framework?
- Yeah, I just think, can I keep it simple?
And especially when you're thinking about
distributing content,
you need to think about the content you're making.
Is it right for your buyer?
How valuable is it going to be?
Distributing that in the right way
and then allowing your buyer to engage with you
on their terms, not your terms.
And then when they are ready to engage in self-identify,
you know, who they are and what they want from you,
then to be able to track that through the funnel
in a very simple way to understand what's creating demand
and what is capturing demand.
- Sydney, thanks so much for joining.
We really appreciate it and we'll talk soon.
Thank you, Sydney.
Next up, we're gonna be talking about
the top three outbound marketing plays
with Natalie Johnson-Charles.
Pipeline, power, hour.
Natalie Johnson-Charles VP of Revenue Marketing
at Outreach, how are you?
- I'm doing great.
How are you doing, Nian?
- I am so excited to chat about outbound strategies
to drive demand, but first,
what is revenue marketing at Outreach?
- Yeah, for sure.
So as the VP of Revenue Marketing at Outreach,
I'm actually responsible for overall top line
pipeline growth and creation in addition
to customer retention, so that includes net ARR.
So my team is actually organized
around a demand center of excellence.
We have campaigns and integrated campaigns
and then I have a newly formed ABM and field marketing team
that is more aligned to sales
to make sure that they are hitting their numbers.
- Yeah, it feels kind of like this is,
you know, perhaps the sign of a new normal in demand.
- Yeah, definitely in this economic environment, I think.
- All right, so what is your definition
of an outbound program?
- So to me, I hear a lot of nuanced definitions
and for me, it's really more of a coordinated effort
across marketing and sales.
You have to have the sales buy in from the get go,
otherwise I don't think that you're gonna see success.
But basically marketing is gonna do the due diligence,
get the input, identify the cohort of accounts,
and make sure they understand the strategy
of what they're trying to achieve.
And today we're gonna talk about
a couple different approaches that you can take.
It could be around net new logo creation,
it can be around pipeline expansion
and cross-sell opportunities,
or it can even be around retention.
But the overall premise is that you're together
jointly identifying what you wanted to take down,
you're pulling the list of accounts
and pulling all the data intelligence
to get you to the right contacts,
the right target account list.
And then you're building out the programmatic bill
of materials that you will then operationalize
through sales with an agreed upon, you know,
KPI cadence as well as what you're trying to achieve.
- Awesome, so let's get into it.
Natalie's three plays, let's start with the first one.
- All right, so I mentioned that there's three different
approaches, so I'm bringing three different examples.
So one of my favorite ones for net new logo acquisition
is around the concept of change agent.
And I've run this a couple of different times
at a couple of different companies,
but the premise is that so many people are changing jobs
these days and age, I think there's a stat,
around 40% are changing each year.
But typically your company already knows
who their champions are.
So you're able to identify that,
you look at the skill set,
you can use vendors like user gems to identify,
you know, where that change might be happening.
And if they fit within the criteria
of your net new logo universe,
you're then designing the programming to go after them.
So this could be anything from a concerted effort of welcoming
gift packages that you're sending
through your outreach sequences through Cinzo,
so our postal, it can be making sure
that they are set up for success.
So this is run again through the SDR, the AE,
complimenting them with any content
that you might customize on your end,
just to make them more successful in their new role.
So the overall gist of this is just to get that first meeting
when that, you know, existing champion is in a new space.
- All right, play number two.
- Play number two.
All right, so this one's gonna be around expansion,
and it can also be used for new logo.
But this is what I'm calling as the deferment trigger.
So in any sales cycle,
you're always gonna have the reason why a deal
is being deferred or a meeting is being deferred.
It could be anything from budget,
not being available until later in the year.
It could be just because decision-making processing
is taking too long.
But the point of this is that there's always that reason,
and there's a way for marketing and sales to work together
to get the right messaging in front of that individual
when the deferment period has lapsed.
So you can actually automate this throughout each,
so that you're actually hitting at the right compelling time.
And if you wanna just quickly get started,
you can pull a list of accounts
where you know that it's happening within the next six months
and make sure that you guys are on top
of getting that messaging in front of that audience.
I think some of the more exciting advancements
that are gonna be happening around this
is around some of the advancements within Generative AI.
So we now offer Smart Email Exist,
which is gonna be able to actually dynamically propagate
those emails to look back at previous behaviors
to look at the reasons why they deferred.
And it really won't require that much interaction
from marketing.
So we'll be able to set that up alongside of our sales teams
and I'm really excited to get that going
now that this is in beta.
- Yeah, this is one of those things
that we've talked about on our podcast,
which is these sort of Black Swan events that happen
and then you have all these deferments, right?
It's like the tech apocalypse stuff or when it was COVID
or all these sort of events that happen where it's like,
okay, everybody's, there's like a reason for deferment.
So how are we gonna message this?
How are we gonna message it?
And there's all the normal reasons
and there's these sort of other events
and I love the idea of just planning ahead,
thinking about these deferments,
thinking about the way that you're messaging them,
because it's like so often done in a very clunky way
and it's often just left up to the rep.
And like, if the rep is just sort of like seven straight emails,
like checking in, checking in, checking in,
it can be a little frustrating.
- Yeah, for sure.
The other thing I failed to mention
is that marketing obviously can warm me the counts up.
So once we know who these people are,
we can move through some IP targeted messaging
to make sure that they were getting the marketing air cover
just to make that conversation
and that potential deferment trigger
actually precipitate into something worth a meeting.
- Yeah, one of the things that we do for that
is invite them on to podcasts.
So if you have a podcast channel,
it's a great way to do a nurture.
It's like, hey, we're not ready to buy
and eight months we're ready to buy.
It's like, hey, I bought in two months,
you come on and co-create some content with us.
So yeah, I love that, I love that play.
All right, number three.
- All right.
- Number three, getting into competitive intelligence.
So I'm actually gonna parlay this one more
to the retention, but you can use this across any strategy.
You've probably run this before,
but I'm really into the one where you're actually looking
at competitive intelligence of, let's say that some competitors
coming after you and they're saying that their product is free.
So what you're doing is you're actually scrubbing against
Sixth Sense or demand-based intelligence looking at GQ crowd
and seeing where potential customers of your base
are comparing your capabilities to that competitor.
You're pulling that list and then you're more proactively
going after them from an air cover standpoint again
through what marketing can do.
And then also feeding the right prescriptive
and proactive messaging with that value message
through the sales teams, through the sequences
to make sure that you're proactively getting
against that potential retention slip.
- I love that, that's really cool.
These three things obviously working in concert together
and not just for the sort of demand acquisition play,
but also like this whole customer lifecycle journey.
Demand is changing the idea that this other side
that you've taken over as well.
I'm curious just how do you sort of stay up with the trends?
How do you stay up on all this stuff
to be able to create new plays?
- Well, I've actually really enjoyed listening
to the band-aid visitors.
(laughs)
And there's a couple other great podcasts
that I do listen to on a recurring basis.
But for the most part, you know,
reading up, staying on top of LinkedIn conversations,
I'm really into the chat, GPT, all the prompts
have been coming out in terms of
how to better operationalize that has been intriguing to me.
But I think we're at a really pivotal point
in terms of where we can automate a lot of this
more successfully to make our teams more effective.
It can still be personalized.
It's just a matter of putting the time in and the input
and making sure you're strategic
and that you're all aligned in terms of what the outcome should be.
- This has been awesome, Natalie.
Any final thoughts?
Anything that outreach is up to?
- Well, I would encourage everyone
to listen to our Explore Plus recording.
The last week, we announced a lot of new announcements
that we're really excited about.
I think we've got a great momentum around
what we're looking to deliver from my true,
you know, creating close platform
and everything that sellers can do within One UI.
Everything from creating conversations,
automating those to listening to call recordings
with the conversational AI pipeline management
all the way to forecasting.
So it's a really exciting year for outreach
and encouraging the sellers that are on this call.
Let's take a look.
- Fast and furious, pipeline power hour, Natalie.
Thanks so much for joining.
We really appreciate it.
Thank you, Natalie.
Next up, we're gonna be talking about
the power of brand engagement with MyGreen.
Pipeline power hour, MyGreen,
SVP brand engagement at Salesforce.
My, how are you?
- Good.
Thanks for having me.
- Excited to have you on today
and excited to talk about brand engagement.
So My, how do you think about brand engagement?
- Brand engagement is obviously near and dear to my heart
and doing it for a really long time.
I'm at Salesforce and I brought this team together
that encompasses the 3D primary functions,
which is customer marketing and engagement,
sponsorship marketing and Salesforce Plus,
which is our streaming platform.
It's exciting because it's a way that we connect
and develop relationships with our customers and partners.
And it's a way how we engage with them in unique ways.
- Yeah, so let's start off with the first one there.
Customer marketing, obviously,
you're one of the pioneers of this new phase
of customer marketing.
How do you think about it?
- Well, customer marketing is unique because, you know,
I originally came from entertainment and sports.
And so taking a page out of the B2C space
and bring it to the B2B and how we leverage
influential voices, we think about like the Be Like My campaign
from Nike, it's like athletes and celebrities,
you wanna be like them, you inspire to be like them.
There's this FOMO effect.
And so what we created at Salesforce was customer marketing
and how do we leverage the voices of our successful customers
that are usually Salesforce and connecting with customers
in a whole new way.
So brands like Coca-Cola and Bank of America and Disney
and they're connecting with their customers
using the Salesforce platform.
And being able to tell that story,
we provide that opportunity to give them a stage
throughout our events and programming.
So it reaches new audiences,
this inspires these audiences.
And at the end of the day,
influences buying behavior.
- Yeah, I mean, Salesforce really like again,
pioneered this customer marketing sort of revolution
is probably a strong word, but really pushing it out.
And I think that like so many companies have seen that
and sort of seen the power of it.
How do you think about it from like a like an ROI standpoint
or like how does it impact pipeline?
- Well, you know, we are like a sales organization.
We model the team like a sales organization.
We have a BDR team, we have the AE team.
We're calling all the recent deals close to understand,
hey, AE, you sold this deal.
How are they implementing it?
When are they live?
Are they happy?
Are they a lead to actually tell a great story?
And so then once they are a lead,
we pass it to our customer marketer AE, right?
And they call them and talk to them about the opportunity
to do co-marketing, celebrate their story on stage,
do a demo, highlight their success.
And ultimately it, you know, aligns to various different
programs that we have out there
that align to our industries.
And we think about these stories that align to our total
of the decimal market within a single industry
or program to drive pipeline.
So.
- Yeah, so obviously tons of rigor in that.
I mean, how many organizations of your peers
think about brand engagement and customer marketing
like that?
Or do you feel like it's pretty unique
the way you do it at Salesforce?
- I think that we're starting to see it more.
When I first started the team 10 years ago,
there wasn't a customer marketing profile out there.
You know, so I started hiring from the sales organization.
We hired BDRs and AEs and the SMB States for instance.
They knew how to do discovery and understand what,
you know, how to sell to a customer
and idea of marketing together.
And so I think people are starting to see that,
companies are starting to see that.
And they're, they're catching on
and we're trying to see customer marketers
all over the place, which is amazing.
- And then for sponsorship, how do you think about like ROI
and pipeline building with sponsorship activities?
- So sponsorship is built to fuel our partner ecosystem
and drive lead gen opportunities
through our strategic event portfolio.
So we deeply are invested in our Salesforce ecosystem
to drive growth and customer success
that benefits all of us.
So we have inventory across all of our events.
We sell, you know, whether it's booth or an experience
to our partners in the ecosystem
that's able to capture lead gen opportunities
that is built on the Salesforce platform.
So it's a really unique way,
but it's kind of keeping it within the family,
which works out really well.
And it also helps us offset our budgets,
which is really important during this current climate.
- Yeah, it's so cool to see how you all not only like
co-market, but also, you know, I love that.
Like the co-creation strategy
where you're creating content with your customers
and with prospects and with all sorts
of different people that drive brand engagement
seems like that's like should be table stakes
for every marketing team now is like that co-creation
and co-marketing strategy.
Do you kind of feel like it should be table stakes?
- Oh, absolutely.
I mean, I think there's so much opportunity
to do more partnerships out there.
When I saw, you know, Nike launch a partnership
with Tiffany, I'm like, okay,
this is the next level to be to be marketing
and how we can partner with various different brands
to go to market because there's audiences
that they have access to that we may not have access to.
And this is the opportunity to bridge that gap
and bring it together.
- And then for Salesforce Plus,
obviously a revolutionary thing again, using revolutionary.
(laughs)
But truly, I mean, it's a cutting edge initiative
from Salesforce.
Can you explain sort of how that fits into pipeline?
- You know, it is our opportunity
to drive our first party data strategy, right?
It is the subscription based streaming service
where we're super focused, hyper focused
on delivering relevant content to the audiences that matter,
right?
We think about our personas, sales, persona, sales buyer,
marketing buyer, service buyer.
We support our first party data strategy
by delivering really great content,
hooking them and interesting them,
or you just see them,
interest them from audiences on platforms like YouTube
or other social channels to hook them
and drive them to Salesforce Plus
and drive our subscriber base.
- Yeah, I always think about this as sort of
multi-channel, multi-format content, right?
It's like people might consume on a bunch
of different channels, might be Spotify,
might be YouTube, might be wherever,
or it might be directly on your website.
But sort of painting the sky in the Salesforce color
so that everywhere they look,
they're seeing content and customer stories
and sponsorships and all that stuff from Salesforce.
- Yeah.
- Any core creative ways that you sort of think
about those sponsorships and think about how you can
sort of co-create or any lessons for our listeners?
- Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's interesting
'cause our core business for sponsorships
is within our partner ecosystem, as I mentioned earlier.
But as we start to see the current measured
buying environment, budgets being cut,
how we spend dollars, all the things,
our budgets are shrinking, our TAM is shrinking
in regards to like our opportunity
to bring in that sponsorship revenue.
So with the increased goal to bring in more revenue,
we are looking at new category of buyers.
So this means how are we opening up opportunities
to attract B2C companies?
How are we looking at brands that are interested
in our audiences at Dreamforce?
One of the things that I think about is how do we just
elevate the experience for our executive experience, right?
Keeping on authentic and not making it salesy,
but back in the day when I used to do NBA All-Stars,
there used to be these suites with hospitality suites.
All these brands would come in
and deliver these great experiences
for these athletes and celebrities.
That's a motion that we haven't unlocked at our experiences.
And that's an easy way to bring in additional revenue
in a different category outside of our partner ecosystem
while still adding value to our attendees.
- Yeah, it seems like with this mantra
of do more with less, that we're kinda all under right now,
that being creative and thinking more like the B2C world
and finding those integrations
seems like it can be a winning strategy.
- Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, when we say two more with less,
it's like do less with less is what we typically say.
It's like really do more with less.
But I think it's ruthless prioritization.
It's focusing on the things that matter,
they're gonna move the needle.
I'm sure you guys know of the B2MOM
that really anchors us on how we prioritize our priorities.
If it's on the B2MOM, it shouldn't be happening.
Last year, we did thousands of customer story brands
or featured thousands of them.
And we did a number, like a handful of assets
for each of those brands.
So this year, what we're doing is actually doing less.
So maybe it's just a few hundred of customer brands
that we're gonna feature.
But we're gonna go deeper with them.
And we're gonna merchandise those stories.
That's kind of the new lingo these days
faring for the B2C space.
We're gonna merchandise those stories
to all the various different channels
and various different formats,
attracting the various different audiences.
So wherever you come from or whatever channel you're on,
you'll see a variety or variation of a customer story
that's specific to that channel.
- My, it's been absolutely awesome
having you on the show today.
Thanks so much and we'll talk soon.
Thank you, my.
Next up, we're gonna be talking about driving pipeline
with direct mail with Chris Rudigrap.
Pipeline power, our final session.
Chris Rudigrap CEO of Sindoso.
How are you?
- I'm doing great.
Thank you.
- Glad to be here.
- Yeah, so excited to have you here.
Excited to chat about driving pipeline with direct mail.
So first off, how the heck do people do it?
What does a direct mail program look like
that is wildly successful?
- Great question.
I think the beauty of direct mail
and gifting in general is that it is one of the most
creative mediums out there.
And I think that you could be as creative as you need to be
and you can solve a lot of different things with direct mail.
Whether you're optimizing for top of funnel,
driving leads in, whether you're trying to drive attendees
to a vent or in a post-event conversion,
whether you're trying to accelerate pipeline through
and help AEs with deal progression.
I think the beauty of it is it's really just another channel
and another medium to break into an account
or to really communicate to that prospect or that customer,
which I think we're seeing a lot of marketers refocus
some other energies on the customer marketing
to really drive net revenue retention in these days.
- I'm a huge fan of Cindoso.
I use Cindoso to send something to the CMO of qualified,
in fact, more so I think it's such a brilliant channel
for a lot of different things.
Gifting is really cool and y'all are at the forefront.
How do you think people should look at like KPIs
for gifting in direct mail?
- Yeah, so what I usually like to suggest for that is one
is Naira, what's your objective?
What are you trying to influence conversion on
or what type of campaign or program are you trying to run?
From there, you could then look at specific,
you know, gifting in direct mail related metrics,
whether that's something related
if it's a digital gift and the open and the engagement rate,
whether it's a physical delivery item
and you're asking for their address
and the attempted address delivery,
or if you're just looking at the overall picture
of your campaign and looking at the cost per pipeline,
if you're looking at some efficiency metrics
and seeing how much you're spending on the direct mailer
and then the outcome in pipeline influenced
or a pipeline created from it.
So again, it really depends,
but my biggest thing that I'd suggest is really looking
at what you're trying to affect, what change
or what metric you're trying to drive conversion on
and then using direct mail and other channels alongside it.
- Yeah, talk about sort of like the other channels
are obviously we're doing a lot of stuff,
but a lot of times that stuff just like
doesn't really rise above the noise
or cut through the noise the way that direct mail does.
So I'm curious like how does it fit into the total
sort of go to market?
- Yeah, I mean, in today's market,
it's really, there's a lot of noise
and buyers are tuned out at times
and so you really got to grab their attention
and then convert their attention,
which is one of the things I talked to Craig
I got qualified recently about is this like one, two punch
where direct mail can grab their attention
and then maybe it's directing them to your website
where you're then using qualified
to then grab that attention and convert that
into your pipeline.
So I like to think about direct mail
as just another way to grab someone's attention
and then hopefully move them through your pipeline funnel
if you're focused on more of the demand gen side,
but again, it can work well in field marketing
and AVM programs and in customer marketing,
all those different areas as well as enabling sales teams
to being able to have another tool in their tool belt
to be able to break into accounts
or accelerate their own opportunities.
- Yeah, it's so tough because when you think about
being thoughtful, being remarkable,
telling someone no matter how good an email is,
I'm probably not gonna share it with like,
I'm gonna go home and talk to my wife and be like,
I got a really great email today.
When you get something in the mail,
you talk about it, you tell your friends,
if it's at work, other people see it.
It's such a physical thing obviously
that it is something that's remarkable
and then when it's personalized,
it just goes that much further.
- Exactly, yeah, I think it's because of the creativity
that you can incorporate with the item you're sending,
the note that's associated with the sending
that before you and after you send it,
all those things can just make it stand out.
I will say though that I have a sales nerd
so when I get a really good email that's personalized
and really hits me, I do share those at times with my sales team,
but I think it's even easier to wanna share
a really good gift or a direct mail item.
That's really creative.
- Yeah, no, I mean, for sure, I think that those are probably
one in a thousand for most CEOs.
- Exactly, 'cause we get a good amount.
- The other thing with gifting and direct mail
is that because there's a cost associated with it,
you actually end up spending more time,
you're not just blasting out a gazillion emails,
you're really staying a bit more focused on saying,
"Yeah, I gotta spend money on this,
"there's limited resources for this."
So you're gonna build the extra mile to personalize it
and to find the right thing to send to the right person
at the right time.
And so that in itself makes the channel
that just that much more remarking it.
- There is no traffic on the extra mile,
that is for sure.
- Exactly.
- Yeah, I mean, I think that it also,
there's just much less competition, right?
Like a lot of your competitors might not be doing it
because it is more expensive and it's cheaper
to just send out a bunch of emails
or to do other things that might scale
but just not be as personalized and targeted.
What are some examples of some ways
that you've seen folks personalize really effectively?
- Yeah, so you can personalize to the person.
So I've seen people do their homework
and see that someone went to a college
or see that someone tweeted about playing golf
and sent something related to your hobbies,
your interests, I've seen people personalize
based on like a larger campaign and program
so that it's related to the brand.
There's personalization based on life moments.
Like if somebody's having a kid
or they're celebrating a promotion
or their company got funding,
there's ways to really personalize the handwritten notes
or the digital note along with the item
and as it relates to like the value proposition
of your company.
And then there's personalization too
as it relates to that person's,
really their day to day
and what they do at their job too.
So again, I really keep pounding on the power of creativity
and in this crazy busy digital world we live in today,
creativity stands out and it's a skill set
and a soft skill that I think marketers
have always been more creative
and I think salespeople are increasingly needing
to lean in and be more creative in their processes.
- Yeah, I mean, I think that the downside
that you hear like on occasion is someone like,
"Okay, everybody, I don't need another Patagonia
or something like that."
And you hear that sometimes
and that is so, so rare
that that is actually happening, right?
And we all have a bunch of swag
from a bunch of different conferences and things for sure.
But at the end of the day,
you give it to somebody else,
like it's not a real concern, I don't think.
- I 100% agree, but to that regard,
one of the things that we really strive to do
is have this like infinite marketplace
and I say infinite because we also tap into
a really cool integration with Amazon
and Amazon is like hundreds of millions of items
that you can personalize and send out through our platform.
And so based on that, you have the ability
to one day send that Patagonia
but the next day maybe it's a digital gift card for lunch
and the next day it's a really cool themed printed booklet.
And the next day it's a targeted gift
that's related to a campaign you're running.
And so I think, yes indeed, there's certain things
that people say, "Ah, do I want another one?"
In reality, most people do and they gift it
to their kids and their family members.
But with our platform too, the beauty is really
you can decide amongst an almost unlimited amount of items.
And so for different stages of the sales funnel,
for different stages of the customer lifecycle,
you can get creative of what you want to send
and what you want to send it.
- Any mistakes that people make
with corporate gifting or sending?
- Yeah, so I'd say some of the things that I see one
is just thinking of the silver bullet,
sending it and closing their eyes
and just waiting for their phone to ring.
I think that it is like everything else
so you have to be diligent and following up
and you have to really make sure
that you are putting effort into the entire process.
It's not a silver bullet that you're gonna send
a thousand mailers out, get a thousand phone calls immediately.
So that's one thing.
Two is I think there's making sure that you're tracking it
and being data driven around the campaign
and automating some of the reporting through that.
So I think that's important.
And then I think the other is just the ability
and or the thought that you want to empower your team more.
I think some, we do go across some marketers that are just saying,
hey, I'm only gonna be the ones that are gonna send it.
We really think of it as another tool
that you can use at the market,
but also have sales reps, SDRs, CalVanagers,
use that and really create a tool and a platform
that's used by people in real time
and allowing reps to send on their own too.
- Chris, this has been absolutely awesome.
Thanks so much for joining.
My final piece of advice is send people toys
and treats for their dogs.
If you know they have a dog or a pet,
send that, never, never gets out of style.
And every time they see it, they'll thank you.
Chris, any follow-ups?
- Nope, I agree.
I think that's an awesome thing.
And if anyone wants to connect with me personally,
I love chatting sales in Martek.
So find me a link, Dan, and let's connect.
- Thank you, Chris.
And to all of our amazing speakers here today,
that does it for our Spring 2023 pipeline power hour.
I hope you are all drunk on knowledge.
And if you'd like these pipeline generating tips,
you can listen or watch our podcast,
pipeline visionaries every single week.
Just head to qualify.com/podcast.
Thanks again and take care.