Pipeline Power Hour: Sales, Summer '23
Buckle up for five masterclasses on sales strategies your team needs to be successful in this challenging market.
Hi everyone, welcome to the sales edition of our summer 23 pipeline power hour.
I'm Robert Simmons, CRO here at Qualified, and today we've got five back-to-
back mini-master
classes to help sales leaders and sales reps feel more confident as they take
on the challenges
of our current market. It's hard right now. The world of tech sales has changed
dramatically.
We're facing a totally different world than we were a year ago, or even six
months ago.
We're seeing buying behavior totally shift. I'm excited to sit back and learn
from some truly
great voices in the B2B sales world, and joining us first to talk about the
biggest changes impacting
sales teams is Gina Sandoval with the sales trends you need to know in 2023.
Hi, I'm Gina Sandoval. I'm a sales leader here at Allbound, and today we're
going to talk about
sales trends that you need to know in 2023. Now, in the past six years or so
that I've been
working in B2B sales, I've seen a lot of things change over the course of how
our buyers buy,
how sellers sell, and everything in between. One of the things that we
obviously want to talk
about today is some of the economic uncertainty that is happening. AI is
definitely changing the
game. There's lots of pros and cons to it. I know everyone feels either maybe
one way or another
way about it, but regardless of how you feel about it, it is definitely
changing how our buyers buy.
And as sellers, we really need to do our best to adapt to the changes in this
space,
and really think about how the demographics of our buyers are shifting, and
really the way that
they buy. So in terms of buying committees, I mean, when I first started, there
are definitely times
where we closed deals where maybe one person or maybe two people were involved
throughout the
entire sales process. On average now, there's about six to seven people
involved in closing a deal,
and even upwards of 20 in larger enterprise deals as well. Deal cycles, of
course, in turn,
lengthen because of this, and budgets have been even tighter, especially post-
COVID,
and 58% of B2B teams have seen budgets stay flat or even reduced in 2023. So
lots of things to
consider there. Now, when we think about what AI can do, there's definitely a
lot of benefits,
of course, as it can increase productivity across the board, looking at ways
where can we automate,
especially when it comes to marketing messaging or maybe outbound or inbound
messaging, you can
get very specific and actually create much more personalized outreach. And I
think as salespeople,
we've all seen it, there is so much noise out there. And it just got harder, I
found,
to send out a message that is actually going to get the attention of the reader
in their inbox.
People are busy. There's just, again, so many emails that we have to sort
through. And so being
able to personalize where you can is going to be so important and thankfully
with AI tools,
you can actually leverage these to your advantage and actually spend more time
going after maybe
some specific accounts rather than hitting everybody with the same message. But
personalization is
always going to be key. I've always been a big proponent of that and I've seen
a lot of success
wherever you can personalize your message. And then in terms of how our buyers
have changed,
obviously millennials and Gen Z are slowly taking over the folks that are
actually in buying
positions now. In fact, they make up about 64% of all B2B buyers today. And
these younger
generations do prefer to do their own research. I mean, I can't tell you how
many times we've received
them a request or gotten a call with somebody and it seems like they've really
done their homework
before we ever even have a conversation with them. So about 43% of your buyers
are going to
prefer a rep-free experience. And 90% of those younger buyers cite somewhat of
a dissatisfaction
with vendors versus only 71% of buyers from older generations. By 2025, more
than a third of B2B
purchases are actually going to be occurring through self-guided channels. So
people just doing
their own research, going through references from maybe people they know. Again
, online reviews are
huge as well. So what do we do as sellers when it feels like there's, you know,
maybe things
aren't looking so great for us. There's a lot outside of our control. It can
feel very, very
overwhelming. And I can speak from personal experience as I've seen, you know,
definitely a lot of things
change in the space, whether I was, you know, BDR or, you know, account
executive or even leading
my sales team. You really do have to think about, you know, ways that you can
adapt. And one thing
that I've always wanted to put a focus on regardless of where my role has been
in a sales perspective,
whether I'm an individual contributor or a leader, I always want to focus on
what I can control and
separate that from what I call an uncontrollable. So let's define those first
and uncontrollables,
anything that our prospects or our customers say and do. Some examples would be
whether or not they
decide to answer the phone when you call them or respond to your email or even
open that email,
whether they are logging into LinkedIn to see your message. Their timeline,
their buying process,
like we mentioned earlier, a lot more people are involved now. There's not a
whole lot we can do
about that. So, you know, I would put that under the bucket of an uncontroll
able. Any organizational
changes, if you've been in sales long enough, you know how frustrated it is
when you've been
working on a deal, you'd have great rapport with your client and then they
leave the company or
maybe they've been like, "Oh, or something happens to where you start to lose
some of that traction."
It is, you know, it's never fun, but it is something that, you know, it can
happen.
Other things as well, like we talked about economic restraints when COVID
happened and everybody was
on a, you know, purchasing freeze. And now what we're seeing where, you know,
buyers again are
becoming younger and the messaging that we have to send out now has to change.
We don't have a lot of control whether or not somebody, again, layoffs,
purchasing freezes, things like that. Again, we can't control the finances of
our clients that
we're speaking with. But now let's focus on what we can control. Controllable,
I have to find it as
anything that we say and do, anything that we can change. And regardless of
what's happening,
in the economic, you know, world, we are always able to be prepared. We're
always able to
have a really consistent follow through. I think a lot of the reason why, you
know, people maybe
don't have a great experience going through a salesperson to purchase something
is maybe they're
not getting the follow through. Maybe they don't feel like that sales rep is
really here in their
concerns. So being an attentive listener, you know, following through, if you
say you're going to
send something, you know, definitely send it and being really prepared are
great ways to
definitely instill that confidence into the buyer. You're delivering your work
ethic,
your attitude on the calls. These are all things that are 100% within your
control. Regardless of
what's happening, you know, the world around you, you are able to set the tone
for each
call that you have with your prospect. You're also able to, you know, be
mindful of your delivery
and your motive. I always kind of point to my team and we have these
conversations and you hear
a sales question from person. Our buyers are getting younger. You know, I think
they're more
aware of those salesy type questions. So you really want to think, what's the
motive behind a
question that you're asking the sales process? Are you actually trying to help
and add value to
the prospect? Are you just looking to help yourself? You know, and you ask sort
of
one-sided questions where, you know, I just want to gather information with the
prospect,
but you're not actually providing a knee value to them back. Prospects feel
that and they, you know,
I don't think they appreciate it. And so you want to be mindful, hey, I want to
make sure that my
prospect feels when they leave this call that they are cared for, their
concerns are, you know,
addressed and really listened to and really understood. A really good way to do
this is just
lead with curiosity. Again, I've been at all bound for a while now and it's
very easy. I think for
any sales rep to kind of get in a routine, get into a little bit of a rut of
you've gone through,
you know, a hundred discovery calls and they start to start, they, you know,
begin to feel the same
a little bit. But with you lead with curiosity and you practice genuine
interests at each interaction,
that is going to completely change a dynamic of the sales process. That person
is now going to feel
like you actually care what they have to say. You're interested in their unique
business problems
and you're asking questions that, you know, you'd only be able to ask if you
were being an attentive
listener. Hey, you mentioned you have hundred partners. How many of those
partners are really
active? Tell me what that looks like today. I know there's a lot of back and
forth on
having scripted questions or guidelines. There's difference of opinions out
there for sure. But
I always found it's it works best if you follow your intuition and your
curiosity. Kind of put
yourself in the mindset of, Hey, if I'm talking to a friend I haven't spoken to
in a while or
meeting somebody new, I try to have a similar dialogue. And so you're not going
to just
in a normal, that full conversation with the person just ask them question
after question after
question, to gather information you want to build upon that conversation. So
really being curious
and trusting your intuition, I think as long as your framework is good, it's
okay to go off script.
How you lead a sales interaction should be a reflection of you. Now, when I
first started,
I didn't really figure out what my sales voice was. And I was kind of copying
off of what I saw my
other team members do. But you want to make sure that how you're worrying
things, how you are
answering questions is a reflection of how you actually talk, because it will
come off more
genuine. Again, your delivery tone is just as important as the words that you
use. I think that
kind of goes without saying, but you would be surprised at how much different
of an outcome
you'll get depending on the energy kind of in your voice and in your, your body
language,
even though we have very limited of that on zoom. And then of course, if
somebody asks you a
question, the natural reaction is just to answer, but I always like to slow
that down. And if they
say, Hey, what is your pricing? Follow that up with maybe what is your budget
look like? And really
get them to explain more rather than jumping into answering the question, why
is that question
important to you? Let's talk about that more. I'm interested. But lastly, I
think everything
comes down to the mindset of just being indifferent before I was in B2B sales,
I did sell internet
door to door that teaches you a lot about how to be indifferent on any outcome.
You want to treat
everybody with confidence and care regardless if you feel like they're a great
fit or a poor fit.
And everybody deserves that level of respect and care in the process. You know,
don't be
afraid to walk away from something. If it is a poor fit, I think when you're
more confident in
doing so, it actually gives a lot of build a lot of trust with you and your
prospect. And of course,
don't let the uncontrollables affect your attitude and your work ethic. You,
you know, are in control
of those things of how far you're going to put in for that day or that week.
And what your attitude
will look like. So if you just lost a deal or maybe you just got a really
unfortunate email that
your champion has left the company. And now you kind of have to start from
scratch. Don't let that
affect your next discovery call from somebody that hasn't even met you yet. And
on the flip side of
that, if you get really great news, hey, we're really excited. We're going to
buy all down or
whatever the case may be. You still being diligent following through your steps
, followed through
that repeatable process until it's side sealed and delivered. You know, you
never want to over
celebrate before anything is totally complete. And kind of just assume that the
worst, you know,
the worst case is a possible scenario. So if you go in assuming, hey, this
person could not show up
on my call, maybe they're going to tell me they don't have budget, whatever it
is, be prepared for
that, but have, you know, hoping for the best of just being prepared for
whatever comes your way
is a really great way to kind of, you want to stay even heal in sales. Everyone
's heard it sales
as a roller coaster, but the more indifferent you can be, you will start to see
that consistency
across quarter over quarter and year over year. And last thing I would say is
never, ever depend
on your prospect to follow through on what they're going to say. It is your job
to hold them accountable.
It's your job to remind them about meetings. It's your job to maintain making
sure those
meetings are attended and they're kind of doing their their side of the bargain
as well. They're
looking to you to guide them. And so, you know, don't take that lightly. It
really is a privilege.
And as we see more and more AI kind of seep into our day to day in sales, just
remember that,
you know, you as a human, you are unique and don't be afraid to, you know,
express that in your
sales process. Thanks so much for sharing those insights, Gina. It's so
important as sales leaders
to keep a pulse on what we're up against and what we need to stay ahead of to
do our jobs well.
Perhaps one of the biggest trends we're seeing is the advent of generative AI
sales tools,
taking the tech world by storm. This new technology has changed the game for
sales overnight.
And one of our very own senior account executives, Maddy Casalen, is ready to
dive into some of the
ways that he's been experimenting with chat GPT and share his best prompts to
help sales pros
stand out in inboxes and personalize their outreach to book more meetings than
ever.
Take it away, Maddy. Hello, everybody. My name is Maddy Casalen. I'm a senior
account executive
here at Qualified. Happy to have you in on the session today to learn about how
we're going to
start using AI as part of our sales processes in day to day to remove some
mundane tasks and
improve efficiencies. So let's dig in. So I get really excited about this stuff
for a few reasons,
mainly because I've seen some real productivity gains myself. And I want others
to experience
the same and the more productive we are, the more time we get to focus on other
things. And
hopefully it leads to more developed deals, more pipeline for us as salespeople
. Now,
there could be like 10 sessions on the topic of using AI in sales, but to make
effective use of
time here today, I'm going to quickly overview five easy ways to get started
with some examples.
And some of you might take this and really lean into it, which is exciting.
Some of you might think
this is all kind of crap, and that's okay. But I think I can speak for a lot of
salespeople today
that we need every angle to find and develop a pipeline right now. And I'm
hopeful that there
are some takeaways that teams can start using right away, just like we are here
at Qualified.
So some people might feel overwhelmed by what's possible with AI, but we're
going to simplify
today in five easy use cases to get yourself introduced to this wave of
technology that's now
available to us. So these ideas are account research, shaping better messaging,
finding
above the line priorities, critical thinking and then self-organization and
improvement.
So starting with account research, being relevant is the key to any effective
outbound approach.
And what used to take several manual hours or sometimes even days to research
accounts to find
relevant insights and nuggets that can really help us find ways to crack into
accounts really
now take seconds. So there's a number of free AI tools that you can use to find
any info that
will help you better understand the accounts and build relevancy. And my
favorites are all free
perplexity.ai, chat, GPT4, Google Bard, things like that. And examples can be
broken down into three
categories. In recency, you can find relevant account news in seconds. So
something like find me
recent news about Company X and their recent product launches and their latest
earnings report,
that's a prompt that I use pretty frequently. It's important to understand
growth trends when
you associate your value prop to your prospects. So an example growth prompt
can be, hey, what
factors have contributed to Company X's growth the last year? Or what is
Company X's plan for
sustaining this growth? And then lastly, another effective way to use prompts
in these tools is
to cobble together media assets and have them be analyzed. So I've asked
something like perplexity.ai
to source me if any executives at some of my target accounts have been featured
in recent
podcasts or articles or interviews. So again, what used to take long periods of
time to scan
articles and read through earnings reports, listen to all these podcasts, now
take seconds.
And there's obviously a few ways to use this information to begin or develop a
deal.
And that leads me to the second idea here, which is shaping better messaging.
Once we have some
relevance in our outreach, we can then build up a personalized message message
that wins,
and at least gets that open right up. So I use the word shape because in my
personal opinion,
it's not fully responsible to rely heavily on AI to fully write your emails. Do
not copy and
paste GPT emails into outreach or sales loft or any other tool. Not only is it
obvious,
but it doesn't have the same huge human judgment that we do. So there are a few
ways we can prompt
GPT or other tools to use certain inputs and then guide it with a few rules.
And this example here,
this is a real email that our team has used from a set of rules and guidelines
that I had built
to engineer a good quote outbound email. So you can read the text here for
yourself,
but I asked AI to weave together my prospects affection for baking cupcakes
with our value
prop. And if you instruct the AI to mesh together the two of those things
creatively,
the outputs are pretty amazing and take seconds to write.
The next idea here is finding above the line priorities. This is a use case
that's probably
my favorite. We all know that money follows pain and pains are meant to be
healed. And the
medicine that heals these pains will receive funding from economic buyers. And
as software sales
people, we always look to anchor one initiatives from the C suite that they
care about. And without
hearing directly from our champions and buyers what those initiatives might be
or what they are,
what's top of mind, your chances of developing a real deal are very slim. And
there's four major
areas why software is purchased in my opinion. It's either increasing revenue,
decreasing costs,
mitigating risks, and improving productivity. And usually at the sea level,
projects are set in
place to achieve these four areas. And we know we can use AI to help identify
sea level initiatives.
Maybe they come from remarks, from executives publicly or from interviews or
from earnings
reports or 10Ks. And we can then consolidate this information to find new
opportunities,
but also develop and accelerate existing big deals in our pipeline by multi-
threading,
by looping in additional stakeholders that you think your solution can impact
based on what you
find. Another one of my favorite use cases here for AI is using it for critical
thinking. I use
GPT as somewhat of a second brain for lots of my behind the scenes work. Two
brains are better
than one, and the speed and intuition of AI is a little bit too valuable to
ignore to help and find
develop these deals. So critical thinking examples that I have personally used
include instructing AI
to act as a specific persona. So let's say you go out and you're selling to and
you target
B2B sales leaders, you can prompt it, "Hey act as a B2B sales leader." You can
also prompt it to
say, "Hey act as a rev-op leader or a COO or a corporate lawyer if you're
trying to come through
some red lines and provide some summaries to your legal team on some feedback
that you've already
gotten." So you can also share some of the challenges that are threading your
team's success. One of
the great use cases here is, if I was a sales leader and I'm managing a team,
is I can say,
"Hey, I manage a number of reps. I'm noticing this constant trend that's kind
of holding our team
back, such as deals stalling at a particular stage. We're losing deals to a
certain competitor."
And then you can prompt AI to see how they would address that challenge if you
say,
"Hey act as a B2B sales leader." And then you can also use AI to inspect your
own sales hygiene
and suggest where you might be missing some key areas to accelerate and win
your deals
by asking AI where tendencies might be from your buyer. So these are some
examples of critical
thinking. And then the last use case that, again, I use pretty commonly in my
day-to-day is how I
think about progressing my career and improving my own skills. So think about
AI as serving as your
secondary career coach. How do you track towards that promotion that you covet?
What sets of traits
should you look for in a mentor? What roadblocks inhibit you from achieving
your goals? You can also
use it for simple task management, skill improvement, and plan building. For
instance, I use it to
hone my negotiation skills by instructing AI to act as a CFO sometimes and play
devil's advocate on
my value proposition or my business pitch. Or I ask AI what a typical leader in
demand gen
struggles with so I can approach that conversation ahead of time with that
meeting with the VP of
demand gen potentially with more comprehension. So the use cases here are
endless, but this has
definitely become part of my daily routine where I'm using this stuff to up
skill myself and learn
a little bit new things every day. So, like I said, some of this stuff can be
overwhelming,
but what is absolutely guaranteed is that this wave of AI is crashing onto us
fast.
And soon we're all going to be expected to do these things as salespeople. So
it's really best
to familiarize yourself with these new tools, find actual valuable use cases,
and start implementing
them. My goal is to help other sellers make sense of all this and hope this has
been helpful here today.
Wow. Thanks, Maddy. AI is everywhere right now, and it's hard to know where to
start,
so it's good to keep those prompts in our back pocket. In the Docs tab of our
event, please make
sure you head over to subscribe to Maddy's sub stack. He's sharing tips on
integrating AI into
day-to-day activities. Speaking of AI, the folks over at Lavender are helping
thousands of
SDRs, AEs, and sales managers craft the best possible emails with real-time
assistance powered
by AI. We've got their very own Mike Wanda ready to share his best practices
for writing emails
that grab you by his attention, engage them, and keep you top of mind. Let's
get over to Mike's
10-minute sales school and see how the pros at Lavender help sales teams craft
better emails
and get better replies. Hey, everybody. I'm Mike here from Lavender. I'm going
to give you a nice
little rundown on 10-minute sales school, but I want to give a shout out to the
qualified team.
I'll put together a great event. I'm glad thanks for having me. And yeah,
hopefully you guys can
find some tactical advice out of 10-minute sales school. But nonetheless, let's
do it.
All right. So for today, I want to start us off with what's the state of the
buyer's inbox?
It's something that not a lot of us actually have observation and do, right?
How many of your
bosses have taken a screenshot of what their inbox looks like and then sent
that to your sellers
inside of Slack? Probably not a lot, right? And so here's what that kind of
looks like,
just how low the bar actually is and how much of it's actually filled with spam
So just to kind of get straight into it, this is what a buyer's inbox looks
like.
All right. It's cluttered. It's got a lot of things that are going on into it.
But how many of
these do you think are actual cold emails? Now, if you were able to say all of
these within four
to five seconds, you're the average buyer. How many of your sales teams know
that?
How many of your sales teams know that the average buyer only spends zero to
three seconds
deleting or deciding if they're going to open an email? That's it. That's all
the time that they
are spending with your email before they ever open it. Zero to three seconds.
And so
things that are wrong with this, let's look at it. For instance, it's all sales
language,
AI writing assistants, right? Hello, Jen. I hope this email finds you well.
Tell me when's
the last time an internal person sent you an email and said, I hope this finds
you well.
Probably never, right? And they surely don't put their name, which is the next
thing, punctuation
or tokens inside the subject line. All of these things scream sales email,
scream it.
And then once you get to the preview text, I would say the best one here might
be the RE,
right? The REED or the reply. And then once you're like, okay, well, let's see
if this is
important. You go into it. It's like, hi, I emailed you about our users slash
customers list.
Immediately, you know it's a sales email. If you take a look at this and then
you take a look at
your inbox, this is probably what all of your sales emails look like. This is
how low the bar
actually is. And so what can we do about this as a sales community and how can
we actually raise
the bar? Because this is not where it should be. Well, let's look at fixing it.
When you look at it,
you've got to use internal language. So what is internal language, right?
Everybody always talks
about it. Go take a look at LinkedIn and people probably all post about it. But
hardly do you find
examples. Internal language is the best way to put camouflage so that you can't
tell it is a
sales email just by simply taking a glance. It's the thing that makes you go to
the next part of the
email, which is your preview text. That is what internal language subject line
is going to allow
you to do things like framework issues, reply rate problems, all those
different things, right?
Take the number one problem you solve for, try to put issues or problems after
that, right? Ask
yourself, what would you send to your boss? If you had an issue with your
current email templates,
would you send, you know, Mike, if we fix this, we can 2x our reply rates. You
probably wouldn't,
right? So use that internal language and then drop all the punctuation and
those name tokens.
Anytime a buyer sees a purple heart or a wizard emoji or a question mark or an
exclamation point,
it all just triggers what we call the mental spam filter. And things that
trigger the
mental spam filter are the same things that are going to get your email deleted
before it ever
even gets the chance to be opened in red. So what can you do when it comes to
preview text?
Well, lead with observations. Take a look at every single one of these emails.
Not a single one of
them say, "Hi, Jen." Or, "Hey, Jen." Or, "Jen." "I saw." They all say, "I hope
our community, right? I,
I, I, everything is geared towards, I hope this finds you well. I emailed you
about this. I wanted
to check in about that." But none of them say an observation. None of them lead
off with our buyer,
the person who we're asking for time. And so that is how you can fix your
subject line
and your preview text. But what happens after they open your email? Well, this
is what success
looks like when it comes to its sales world right now. It's pretty bad. Source,
G-mass,
Cognizant, and Gartner. The average code email reply rate is 1 to 5%. 1 to 5.
That's how low the
bars. 2% when it comes to code calling connection rates. And 72% of buyers who
say they prefer a
rep-free experience. Has the sales world? That's a number we need to see go
down.
The last thing we want our buyers feeling like when they hop onto the call with
a sales person,
they're not going to leave with anything new that they've learned. This is a
number that we
should take seriously. We should leave written down and send back to our teams
at the end of this
to say we got to fix this. We want to be seen as a brand that people want to
interact with somebody.
Now, how can you fix it? Right? What can we do specifically when we focus on
emails?
How are we going to craft emails that get responses? Everybody likes to say,
"The golden phrase, I need to break through the noise." Or, "How do I break
through the noise?"
Well, it is not by adding more noise. Everybody always says, "I like to use
this analogy
that when somebody comes in to a call with me and they talk to me and they say,
"Mike,
I need to reduce or break through the noise. I need to go through the noise."
What I say is, "Okay, what are you doing about it?" And oftentimes the answer I
get is,
"Well, I need AI to help me automate more messaging." And I'm like, "All right,
so it sounds like
we're trying to turn up the volume. I don't know if you guys have ever been to
a room that's quiet
with a bunch of people. And then suddenly people start to talk and then slowly
but surely one
person starts talking louder than the other. And you see where I'm going with
this. The volume
gets louder and louder in the room. And so the best way to break through the
noise right now
is right in front of your face. It's by writing your own emails, not having an
AI do it,
reducing the volume so that you can hear clearly through everything that's
going on,
personalizing for your prospect and research and lead with relevancy. So what
does that look like?
Because it takes a long time, right? Well, this is something that you guys
probably get.
And I would ask yourself, if this is an email that your sales team is sending,
is that the answer? Would you reply to this? Probably not. So we don't want to
set that bar there,
right? We want to set this bar in a better way. So let's go through and break
down why this email
probably isn't going to get replied to. Well, first we've got a really long
subject line.
Now it's personalized because this person was a two time NCAA swimming national
champion,
which is awesome. But that's not a reason why they're going to reply, right?
And so
this is leading with personalization, but not so much relevancy. And then the
second thing is
it's so much personalization, but it's not focused on the actual relevancy,
right? You have to be
relevant when you talk about your emails. One of the golden rules that I have
is if I can't
talk about the current problem that you're having today, if I don't see an
actual problem,
but there's a bunch of personalization stuff that I can find on you, I'm not
going to write you an
email. Because just because I did my research and I know that you were an
athlete and you were a
great swimmer, doesn't mean that you actually have any problems in your current
business.
And that's why you should take a call with me. Personalization is awesome, but
it's best used
in a PS. Through our data, what we found is using personalized PSs rather than
adding a
personalization touch for your first sentence of your email increased your
reply rates by 26%
on average. And then lastly, this is a very long email. It's going to take a
long time to read.
It's probably 200 plus words, and it's really cluttered. This is how we fixed
it.
It took us less than two minutes, less than two minutes to rewrite that entire
email,
focus on all of the relevant parts, add in some really cool personalization
throughout the way,
shorten the subject line down to two to three words to sound more integral,
right? And it focuses
much less on that personalization aspect and much more on the relevance aspect.
So if you take a
look at these emails side by side, one of them scored a 65 and the other one
scored a nine.
Now, you'll notice same thing. We took the same content, the same words, and we
just simply told
a different story in a much shorter, more concise way focused entirely on our
prospect.
But if that's not enough, let's go into another email. This one specifically
wrote by an AI,
whoever, the person who submitted this email to me, they said, well, I like to
use Shashi
Petit to write all my emails. And I was like, ooh, all right, sounds good.
Hello, the efficiencies.
But there's one thing that's been changing how I'm going to give you guys some
spam filter updates
here. Recently, what's happened is Google and Microsoft have to change their
spam filters
to add in an AI detection model. So if you're using AI to write emails for you,
you might be triggering some spam filters. And if you send any emails that are
over 50,
over 50 net new code emails a day for that individual user's account, the odds
you go to spam
are dramatically increased for every email after 50. So be careful when we talk
about some volume
plays. It's probably why some of you might have seen a decrease and your
deliverability and your
ops created starting back in the middle of February. But for this example, you
can see a lot more
black kind of like highlight, right? It's because there was a lot of talking
all about me. It was
all about me in this email, right? It was clearly AI written. I mean, outside
of us telling them
telling us that it was wrote by an AI, you can kind of tell that it was, right?
Things like,
I'm not going to pull the wool over your eyes or front and center. This is a
sales email, right?
Things that are just going to get deleted right away. Some of you might even
have laughed when you
read it. But there's one other thing that this does that a lot of sellers do.
It is they use
length and bullet points. And what I mean by that is rather than talking about
one problem at a time,
they put in all the four things that make their company special. And the issue
with that
is you lose your prospect. And so what you need to do is just simply write the
email yourself,
talk all about your prospect rather than yourself and make it skimmable. Just
focus on one thing.
That's all you have to do. Because when you try to focus on more than one thing
what ends up happening is you lose content for your follow-ups. And if you ask
your sellers,
what is the part of the process that they struggle with the most when it comes
to code outreach,
they're probably going to tell you follow-up content. Now, all my marketers
that are out there,
they're probably like, "How you struggle with follow-up content? Push you
everything, right?
We've got a bunch of content on the website." Well, for the salespeople, you
just got to start
talking about one thing at a time. Because if you list four bullet points of
all the things that
you do that's great in your first email, that's four less things that you can
talk about in your
follow-up. So what's the winner in this one? You probably could guess. It's the
shorter, all about
your prospect, rather than about yourself, and much more skimmable email. That
's a 92, rather than a
78. So overall, new definition of success. I need you guys to get away from
that one to 5%
of the average code email or pli rate and get to where the lavender percent is,
which is 20 and a
half percent. Across our customer base, that's the average code email reply
rate. And I can tell
you right now, lavender is not a silver bullet. It's not the answer, right? But
what it is,
is it's your coach and your assistant. And that's what you actually, you need
to be able to write
those emails yourself and break through the noise by writing for your prospect,
rather than for
what's most effective for you. So how can you get there? How can you get to
that 20 and a half percent?
Take these five things and apply them today. Write your own emails. I know, I
know.
Painful topic, painful topic. It's all right, we're going to be okay. Talk
about your prospects
problems. Hold yours to yourself. Or if you want to talk about your problems,
you can email them
to me. All right, I'll listen all day long. But hey, talk about your prospects
problems. Try not to
talk about yourself. I like to give myself one sentence of real estate in my
emails to be able
to talk about what lavender does and how I can help. But everything else, 100
percent geared
towards my prospect. Also, optimize for the phone. 80 percent of buyers and
prospects open up emails
on their phone first. 80 percent. All the leaders listening in on this, ask
yourself,
where do you typically open up your emails? Most of you are probably going to
say your phone.
Some of you might even say your Apple Watch. So that's where your sellers
prospects are doing
the exact same thing. Communicate that with your teams and make sure they're
optimizing for the
phone. The last two things I want to say is use internal language. Remember we
talked about that
for our subject lines? Go through use two to three word subject lines and have
this internal
camouflage aspect to it so that you're not triggering the mental spam filter.
And then last but not
least, highlight that one problem at a time. We talked about the effects that
it has when you don't.
But seriously, make sure you give yourself some content for the follow ups and
you'll start to see
better email conversions today. That was awesome Mike. Now you've done all that
hard work to personalize
your outreach, send the killer email and you booked a demo. This is where the
rubber meets the road.
Let's talk to Eric Portugal Welsh, director of RevOps over at demo stack and
learn how to craft
an unforgettable demo. Hi everyone. My name is Eric Portugal Welsh. I'm the
director of revenue
operations at a company called demo stack. We focus on building a platform to
allow you to
demo your product in the best light, putting your best foot forward. So today I
'd like to just run
through what building an unforgettable demo looked like and how that can impact
your sales team,
your CS team and really kind of shine a light on demo analytics, something that
we haven't
insight into in the revenue operations space before. And something I think is
really going to be
really impactful for teams moving forward. So what is demo analytic and what it
was important?
Well, we've been living in a space where call intelligence has moved the needle
a lot for
sales teams and for customer success teams. And what have they done? They've
tried to replicate
what good looks like from a sales rep. And we've done that through call
coaching, how much time
they spend talking, all these like slew of analytics that the gongs, the chor
uses of the world have
brought to the forefront of our our minds. But we haven't really done the same
thing with demos.
What does a good demo look like? How many do you have to give in order to make
to get your
point across? What specific pieces of your product do you have to show in order
to engage people
and make them want your product? And then on top of that, how many, like how
often do people
receiving demos actually want to visit your environment before buying decisions
made?
So something that we've done at demo stack here after about two years of
building a platform where
you can essentially clone the front end of your product, start recording demos,
giving them
presenting them to prospects. We've we've sifted through a bunch of data and
started to put together
a big robust analytics package. It allows you to, as a customer, to see how
many demos are needed
to be given. The median duration of those demos, the different screens that
need to be shown.
And then you can basically take what good looks like from your top performing
reps and try to
replicate that across your team. I'll dive into that more in just a second. But
you know, to us, it seems to be really important that people are able to
create very specific talk tracks. And that's something that we're trying to
highlight and bring
to the forefront. So what does that look like when we're talking about what
replicating what a
top rep is able to do? Well, we can we can start to generate winning demo play
books. So, you know,
for looking at this slide, for instance, our number one rep with five deals,
one is spending
most of their time looking at analytics, editing and integration. So maybe
those are the three places
that every demo needs to hit on first in order to, you know, get the engagement
, the prospect
engagement and start to start to win those deals. So like the gongs of the
world keep saying,
replicate your A players. That's what we're looking to, you know, give you
insight into doing.
And that's at something that we've signed to be really important when focusing
on the actual demo.
In addition to this, when rolling out new product features, adoption is always
something that's
kind of forefront of product marketer minds, right? So we want to know, let's
say custom CSS in this
example is a new product feature that we're trying to push the AEs to demo. We
can really see who's
adopting that in the demo process and if it's effective or not. Maybe custom
CSS was this big
brainchild of the product team and people don't actually want to look at it. We
're spending less
time talking about it, but still winning a lot of deals. Maybe that's something
we want to focus
less on and then focus more on building a more robust editing process here. So
moving on, the
other pieces is how do demo analytics actually affect the sales cycle? So, you
know, every, I think
most people are inside of Salesforce or HubSpot in the revenue operations world
and really focus
on conversion rates, win rates. What duration, how long, how many demos are
people given at each stage
of your sales pipeline? And then what is the, how does the correlation of your
demo to win rate
affect where you're focusing time at S1? And how is that going to affect and be
impactful for
your sales leadership? And then, and this to me is something that's like, it's
really exciting.
So how long, like when you're thinking about resource planning and planning for
the future,
how much time does it take in the demo in order to win a deal? So how much
effort am I putting in
as a rep? How much time is the team putting in? And how do we scale that across
the, across the
organization? Buyer engagement. Another thing that's really interesting when
you're, you're talking
about giving a demo and providing a prospect with an environment where they can
play around with
your product in like a safe, guide-railed space. And then you're able to meet
your prospect where
they are and see real-time insights of what they're clicking around and what
they're looking at.
If they're sharing that demo environment with somebody else, you're able to
kind of meet them
where they are, time to your follow-up perfectly. So for example, here we have
the Slack integration
that's pinging us every time somebody's visiting a specific part of our demo
environment.
Number of steps they can include and how long they've spent there. So in this
case, you know,
you could reach out to Mark Robles, Robles, terrible pronunciation. And follow-
up with them
about the specific tour training for redesign page that they're looking at, so
if there's
anything else that they'd like to see. And it really helps you get a better
insight into
what your prospects are actually interested in. So maybe coming into the next
meeting,
you can tailor that demo more towards the pages that you've seen them actually
focusing on.
So that's it. Just a short and sweet talk about what, you know, the current
state of the demo
environment and what demo analytics mean and how they could potentially help
you moving forward.
Thanks so much for sharing those insights into how to use analytics to
strengthen your demo
production Eric. Of course, all these great learnings mean nothing if the team
is disengaged
and struggling with morale. We'll round out our pipeline power hour with Sam
Nelson,
founder of stlleed.com, with a masterclass in motivating your team when facing
economic downturns.
Let's hear it, Sam. Okay, so my name is Sam Nelson. I'm the founder of stlleed.
com. It's a big
community of stlleed. And I'm going to be talking today about motivating your
sales team through
tough times. So motivating your team through tough times is a hot topic. So it
's something that
pretty much everyone is dealing with right now. Some people more than others,
but even in the best
case, unless you're like an AI company that's hit the right way for the right
time, it maybe is a
little bit different than 2021. And anytime things go, I feel like they're
going backwards instead of
forwards, it can be a little bit of a hit on morale. And as a sales leader, you
need to make sure that
you have a culture of winning and a culture, an exciting happy culture. And it
can be a little
awkward when times are tough. And you also want to do this without lowering
your standards. So
motivating your sales team through tough times is the big question. And there
are a lot of different
answers and a lot of different strategies for doing that. What I want to focus
on today, I want
to add a couple of constraints to this topic. And that is by changing only
things that I can control,
assuming I'm a manager of individual contributors. Okay, so if I'm a manager of
individual contributors,
and without spending any additional money. And then lastly, something that's
pretty easy to
implement. So something that's totally within your purview. And that easy
strategy is increasing
the surface area of wins. By magnifying wins, you can increase the culture of
winning, you can
make, you can have a culture of winning, you can make things more exciting, and
you can increase
morale without having to lower your standards or make any big changes. So this
is something
that's very simple that basically any manager can do. And there are three
things we'll talk about.
So we'll talk about celebrating small wins. We'll talk about where you can
easily involve
upper management. And then lastly, just keeping things fun. So number one,
celebrating small
wins. So you want to find the lowest, maybe like the smallest area of
achievement that you can
comfortably celebrate. So may have a community of SDR leaders, a very common
one for SDR leaders
is meeting set. Okay, this is a very small win. These are happening all the
time.
The key is to make these visible everywhere you possibly can. So in the Slack
channels,
messages from the manager, bringing them up in standing meetings, bringing them
up before the
training, having leaderboards, maybe there's an email that goes out every day.
It is very hard to
over celebrate wins on an SDR team. And so this extremely motivating, it costs
no money. It's
very time efficient to do. When someone is successful in some way, celebrate it
everywhere. It's
exciting for the person who's winning, it's motivating to that person. And it
also is reinforcing to
other people that it's easy to win. All right. Or that winning is very possible
Next is involving upper management. So this one is, there are some very simple,
easy ways to do this
that take very little effort from the upper management. So for example, having
them common in the
Slack channel where we're celebrating wins or having them show up to one of
your meeting where
you are recognized, one of your meetings where you are recognizing people who
have been successful.
Right. It's good to have some time every week, sometimes right before a
training,
or right before some kind of weekly meeting where you kind of recognize people
that have been
outstanding in different ways. Involving upper management in some of those ways
can be
extremely motivating. And a lot of times managers can forget just how
motivating this can be
to individual contributors and also how willing upper management is to do this.
So very easy,
takes no money or time and is very effective. And lastly, keep things exciting.
So you want to
do things to keep things fun. Okay. There are a lot of fun and memorable things
that you can do
that cost no money and make the job more fun. One that I talk about is like,
my blue hair was actually initially just kind of like a fun spiff. It was when
new SDRs came in,
if they beat the record for their first month, I said I'd dye my hair blue. And
that's so out of
character for me that it was really hilarious and really fun. Weirdly, it
became my brand. And now
I've been stuck with it forever and probably will be forever. But man, it was
like a fun incentive.
So anything self-deprecating, anything fun or out of the ordinary or memorable
is very
valuable and can stack on top of any other incentives that you have. So a few
things you can do to
magnify the ones on your team. Thanks, Sam. And thanks so much to all of our
speakers today.
I hope you walk away with some notes on how to help your team be as successful
as possible,
no matter the market we're facing.