Afleveringen
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Saurabh Madan oversees Moengage's go-to-market and customer success initiatives in South East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Based out of Singapore, Saurabh has had over 15 years of experience in Sales & Business Development. He is a writer, tech enthusiast, writer, and sales coach.
At the B2B binge APAC edition, he spoke about one of the most significant challenges marketing and sales folks across the globe face – the mindset of the buyer. Companies have been trying to unravel the secrets of understanding the buyer mindset always. Many companies have tried various methods to do it and have succeeded relatively. However, the process isn't homogenous yet. It may work for one but may not work for another. So the experimentation has to go on.
Understanding of the customer starts with the discovery and backward to selling. Find there is a need or problem that requires solving. Find it and talk about then devise a sales pitch that works for them. Directly jumping into a sales pitch is not justified for both the parties. You don't know what they want, and the customers are being taken for granted. A salesperson should never do that in his right frame of the mind.
Therefore, there has to be the right modus operandi of communication between the two. Discover more data points about the customer better. You are off understanding them. You have to realize that everyone is buying. Everyone in your funnel is buying.
B2C and B2B buy very differently, and the way you discover the mindset is also quite different. For a B2C, there is plenty of data in the form of Data-lakes and massive databases that can be tabled and presented in the form of graphs and charts to help you understand your enormous number of customers you are targeting. Organizations employ large data engine to gain this inference.
But for a B2B, the idea is entirely different. Each one of them has a unique need and cannot be generalized to an enormous mass of customers. The more conversations you make, the better you understand your customers. You cannot generalize your product, but you can make slight customizations to suit your customers. To make those customizations, you have to understand the customers deeply. It needs many conversations. With LinkedIn, you can cluster many similar profiles, but it won't help you group based on the mindset. In a discovery call, try to understand the below few things:
What are you solving?
What are your customers' issues?
What is the problem they have identified and able to solve?
What are the problems they have identified and not able to solve?
Of all the problems they face and trying to solve, can you do better at solving the problems?
How will you impact them in terms of sales, revenues, KPIs, and other forms of impact?Build your reputation with your customers so that they open up to you. To build a personal rapport, you have to be genuine and find that commonality between you and your client. Then make the relationship on the commonality. Unravel the mystery behind their needs and problems by continually talking to them and understanding them.
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Mona Lolas is an accomplished Global Sales and Marketing Executive with over 25 years of experience in the IT industry. She has international exposure in conducting business in Australia, APAC Regional, and Global roles working in Vendors and Blue-Chip Companies. Mona has built new business lines, bringing new products to market and establishing vendor's presence in the Asia Pacific region. She holds extensive experience in go-to-market plans that directly support business growth objectives and drive significant and measurable ROI - increasing demand, driving sales, and positively impacting brand equity. Mona has led highly skilled marketing teams that deliver engagement with the channel and end-users and continuously learn through evaluation and iteration. Mona has a passion for promoting women in leadership positions and advocating empowering girls join the IT industry.
Mona showered Ampliz B2B 4th Edition with her immense knowledge and spoke elaborately on how important it is to align sales and marketing. Alignment in sales and marketing comes from the top of the organization. The message has to be crisp and clean from top to bottom. The value you offer to your stakeholders should be communicated across your organization equally. CSO and CMO are the keystones in this endeavor of creating alignment. They have to communicate effectively to align both the teams.
Marketing and Sales KPIs should be focused on delivering value to your stakeholders while speaking the same language. Marketing will control the channels and talk about the language that aligns with sales and your target audience. It asks from marketing much focus on what they are doing, what they cannot do while maintaining alignment with the sales. Marketing activities should not spread too thin.
Prioritize the role of marketing and have the objectives mapped out and aligned with the overall aim of the organization. As said before, it should come from the top to bottom. The organization's purpose should breakdown slowly into department objectives to team objectives to personal goals.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Sudhir Nayar is the Managing Director of Commercial Sales at Cisco. For the past 30 years, he has led IT sales operations by creating skilled and empowered teams. In the process, he has mentored budding leaders for the Indian IT industry. Sudhir leads IT sales teams across large enterprises and SMB, built and transformed channels, developed a corporate strategy for leading IT companies like Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Microsoft, and Cisco. He is always looking out to participate in industry forums to learn, share my perspectives, and interact with like-minded professionals on digital platforms. Sudhir is an eloquent speaker, great mentor, environmentalist, Strategic Leader Focused On Revenue, Growth, and Profit Maximisation.
At Ampliz B2b Binge, he spoke elaborately on how to build high performing and resilient sales teams. He has outlined five steps to building transformative teams.
1. Build trust within the team
2. Focus on the health of the business
3. Building a winning culture
4. Formulate a three-year plan
5. Effective communication
Build trustListen more. The first time you meet your team, talk to teammates about their success, how can, as an organization, you can help them grow and ask how can you help them achieve the goals. When you ask them these sets of questions, they start opening up to you. Your teammate becomes a little chatty and starts trusting you. Go back to them and tell them what can be done now and what can be done later. Focus on their strength and try to leverage them.
Focus on the health of the businessMost businesses focus on topline and bottom line. However, as a leader, you should focus on what is coming in the future and prepare your team. Keep an eye out for the changing trends and communicate it to your teams regularly. Please encourage them to adapt to the changes and keep learning new things.
Build a winning cultureBuild culture by inspiring them and giving them a sense of safety. When people feel safe and hopeful, they can choose to go beyond what is expected of them. Then your job changes form inspecting to inspiring people. Your work now is instilling hope in them. That is when the time arises, they give more than 100% of their abilities. Accept failure and foster growth and nurturing.
Formulate a 3 Year planAs a leader amongst leaders, you should have a six month, one year, and a three-year plan—Breakdown the big picture in your mind into bite-size achievable chunks to make things easier.
Communication PlanAll the plans and the above-mentioned activities will fail if you don't have a concrete communication plan. Understand who are your key stakeholders are and what their priorities are. Focus on how you can align the priorities to achieve the goals. But it has to be adequately communicated. Therefore, have a communication plan that aligns with your key stakeholders and speaks their language.
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Utkarsh serves as the Head of Business Development for SAP Asia Pacific and Japan. Based in Singapore, Utkarsh is responsible for market development strategies and sales programs across Asia-Pacific and Japan to realize the potential and future proof of SAP's long term vision. Leading with a customer-first mindset, he has a proven track record of developing sales and business development strategies that enable Intelligent and connected enterprises enabled through a best in class Experience Management.
Utkarsh is passionate about the digital economy and its implications for the customers and the broader ecosystem of SAP. In a leadership career spanning 15 years, he has worked on Product development and management, customer lifecycle, Business transformation, People Leadership, Sales, and Business Development.
At Ampliz B2B Binge APAC edition Utkarsh delivers insight into various kinds of experiences customers have. How understanding and leveraging experiences can foster growth? Providing expertise is the most critical factor that has governed the development of the most influential organizations in the world. Experiences are the interactions that people have with the organization. If you can manage it, you can provide the best possible experiences.
66% leave brands due to lousy brand experiences, and 95% share it on social media. Any occasion, good or bad, always escalates across communities. Whether you want it or not, the bad experiences escalate faster. Therefore, organizations prepare well ahead in time for various scenarios.
User experience and customer experience are two integral parts of the experience management. User experience deals with providing the best possible experience while using the product but the customer experience deals with the complete lifecycle of the customer. Customer experience goes from the first touchpoint to the last touchpoint in the lifecycle. In some cases may extend beyond it.
The industry is willing to spend billions of dollars on it. The experience is so important because it is the experiences that make you trust a brand and later on purchase from them. Experiences lead to a better social presence that leads to the creation of business opportunities. Research says there are seven touchpoints before someone becomes your customer. So you have seven chances to provide and build on great experiences. With each experience, you have an opportunity to get a customer. The loyalty increases, and you can upsell your products, which leads to the growth of the top line.
The question now arises how do you build experience. The answer lies in data. Organizations have to manage experience from end to end the journey of the customer. Measure every possible interaction. Experiment and save the data and apply measurable inferences to improve the experience. The biggest challenge and opportunity for an organization is to have a single source of truth or information. The challenge lies in administrating the relevant information. The most effective option is everyone has the information about the prospect and at what stage the potential is in. Having this knowledge provides the right opportunity to create great experiences.
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Fernando Angulo has 10+ years of experience in digital marketing. He is currently Heads Communications at SEMrush Inc. Fernando is actively involved in the search marketing world and a regular speaker at Digital Marketing and Ecommerce conferences and events worldwide. He specializes in Competitive Intelligence and Competitors Research, SEO, and Paid Traffic Strategies for eCommerce and online business.
When 77% of the company focused on content marketing, only 48% can explain their strategy. It's mind-boggling to see that less than 50% of people have an in-depth understanding of content marketing. On average, they spend less than USD10000 on content marketing. The significant challenges faced by the organization is generating quality leads from the content and generating quality content.
The quality content is one that aligns one with your target persona. Organizations should spend time creating various formats of written content and find what aligns with your customer. Once you ascertain what your target persona want, optimize your content for SEO and target persona. The format becomes the brand language that can help you generate more qualified leads that resonate with you.
Follow the praetor principle of the 80-20 ratio. Spend 20% time writing or creating content and 80% of time distributing it. The main channels are social media, email, and various other channels. The primary sources of traffic still search and direct traffic. The customers are looking for more valuable and conversational content, answers to their questions. They are trying for a more featured snippet. The featured snippets are the primary source of creating brand impact.
Measure the impact of your content through the social media channels, direct traffic, and the quality of leads generated. So have a flow set for your content marketing. Analyze your content and create a plan for it. Then act on your schedule, monitor the activities related to your content, and maximize the impact by sharing on social media, optimizing SEO, and link building exercises.
Create long-form content with words exceeding 810 words. Cover the topic in detail and add as much value as possible. Answer as many questions as possible that genuinely answer to the queries of your target audience. Have a structure to your content and repurpose them to different formats to make it easily consumable.
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Namrata Kapur is the Head of Marketing of the Cloud Integration Department of IBM. She is also the host of the vlogging series Marketer in tech. She is also a writer, speaker, and mentor.
At Ampliz B2B Binge 4.0 APAC edition, she shares nuggets of knowledge regarding measuring the KPIs that matter to business growth. Marketing goes beyond awareness today. It has every nook and corner of different processes.
All KPIs of various departments are interrelated. They have to club into a bucket so that they are focused on the right ROIs. ROIs are achievements of business goals. The business goals are leads generated, do prospects know your offering, how do you differentiate from your competitors, are different teams are aligned, and many others.
One of the most significant ROIs is the Share of Voice. Share of voice measures how your presence compares across competitors. Do your activities contribute to the above ROI?
Are you driving the right traffic? Do the events or various activities bring in the right traffic? How are you actively pursuing them? What are your conversion rates to and of leads?
When organizations ask what is your plan for the next quarter. It means how you can reach the goals and your tactics—all your steps involved in the tactic need to have KPIs and ROIs. When you have all that information in place, it will help you achieve the goals.
The best way the organizations can achieve great ROIs iff the KPIs are aligned to it. The way to go about achieving the KPIs is to plan, execute, analyze, and adapt. Plan meticulously, perform consistently, analyze honestly, and adapt ruthlessly. There is no other way.
It does not matter you follow a funnel, pipe, or a flywheel; every stage you interact must have specific things you want to achieve or ROIs. To reach the ROI numbers, you should have small measurable KPIs so that you can measure and take necessary actions to realign your actions.
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Adarsh Noronha leads Hubspot's growth efforts in India. Adarsh is responsible for HubSpot's sales and revenue across India and will be based in HubSpot's Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore. Before joining HubSpot, Adarsh was General Manager and Senior Sales Director at Oracle, where he led the customer experience business in India, helping enterprises in the region with digital transformation. Before Oracle, he served as Country Manager at Informatica and spent six years in sales leadership positions at Salesforce India.
At Ampliz B2B Binge 4.0 APAC Edition, Adarsh focused on the growth of the business through the flywheel concept. According to him, customers have changed the way they function and their behavior. They are more critical and impatient than before. They expect an immediate response from customer service representatives. Gaining their trust is the biggest challenge the marketers and sales folks are facing.
People trust their friends and colleagues. Therefore, word of mouth becomes the most significant source of truth and trust for the customers. The customers trust the information coming from their friends. Businesses are failing to adapt to this change.
Businesses have adopted inbound marketing method in totality. They are attracting, engaging, and trying their every bit to delight the customers. It is one of the biggest challenges they are facing. The funnel was the holy grail of the businesses. The issue with the funnel is that it focuses on sales folks rather than the need of the customer. Flywheel centers around the customer with content and various activities built around it.
Flywheel focuses on customers and allows them to bring in customers that fit the bill with sales, marketing, and services built around customers. They start to rotate around the customer. It helps to attract more customers with the help of current customers.
Customer-focused flywheel engages, attracts, and delights the customers. They help to create experiences. The experiences make delight which they would want to share with their colleagues and friends. It helps in attracting the right kind of audience to your product. Customer delight is part of every section of the business, just not the customer success team. When joy becomes everyone's job, they become customer-obsessed. Being customer-obsessed makes you put customer needs at the forefront and cater to them.
Being genuine is part of the delight. If you are honest, customers will come to you. The customers will accept you from their heart. Create every piece of content that resonates and shows that you understand them. The better you get at it, the more customers are attracted to you. You can convert them to sales easily. Be transparent with your pricing and build your transparency and credibility.
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Sangram Vajre is the Co-founder at Terminus, 2x Author, Host of #FlipMyFunnel Podcast, and Speaker and loves doing #LinkedInLive. He is the foremost authority in Account-based marketing or ABM.
As one of the key speakers at the B2B Binge 4.0, US version, he sheds light on the three biggest mistakes the companies adopting ABM Strategy make. He also shares how to implement ABM strategy effectively, the right time to implement the process, and answers various queries of the audience.
So, coming to the mistakes most companies make are
1. Too much focus on demand generation. Companies often forget that money is in the sales pipeline. Instead of just focusing on getting more and more people in the channel, focus on individual leads. Give them enough attention and care to convert them into leads. The more you focus on nurturing the leads, the better are your chances of converting them.
2. Companies are spread too thin. Businesses try to focus on every product and service they have. Lack of focus is a significant issue. Take your best performing product or service to the market and evolve as the market needs. As you focus on a single product, you are very likely to care about every lead that comes for that product and will try to convert them into deals. The prospects will receive enough attention to become your customer. Focus all your efforts on a single product. If you are good at something in marketing, double down your efforts on that and make conversions happen. For example, if you are great at doing events double down on it and have fantastic events.
3. Enterprises often forget that the brand drives the demand. Most companies are skeptical about spending dollars in the marketing budget during a crisis. During the crisis, be more data-oriented and focus on the areas of marketing that is yielding results. Improve and make more efforts on the channel. Make the best out of those channels. Once you start doing this, leads will start flowing in. During a crisis, people become strict with their spending. They want to put the money in the right places. Unless you market yourself in that way, businesses won't make a deal with you. So keep nurturing your brand during the crisis. Make yourself visible to others while you double down on the marketing efforts that are working for you.
Create the best possible marketing ecosystem around your product that makes your leads and customers feel valued. If they don't feel valued, they will not invest in your product even though you claim to have the world’s best product. It can help you rise above the noise and will help you build the most significant possible brand you can be then.
Focusing your efforts in a single direction will take you a long way than a distributed focus over many things. Account-based marketing is about having focused efforts on leads and converting them to leads.
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GuruPandian is chief of growth and product at Ampliz. He has extensive experience in working with B2B data companies like ZoomInfo (now DiscoverOrg Zoominfo). He is a speaker and a great mentor.
Here at Ampliz B2B Binge, he speaks about how B2B data has evolved over the years and how it can help businesses achieve their goals. Today marketing has a sole focus that is growth. The growth always boils down to lead generation, lead nurturing, and sales, irrespective of whatever activities you perform every day. So growth is about what is your lead volume and deals velocity? It means how many leads are coming in every day and how quickly those leads are converted into deals.
Traditionally b2B data was acquired from events, website forms, signups, collateral downloads, LinkedIn, and many other places of interest. Most of the time, the data-points include the name of the person, email address, company, industry, designation, number of employees, and other factors. Traditional data partners not only help you find new leads but also append data and enrich existing data. Data maintenance is increasing, with so many changes happening around the world. Maintain a single cell of data costs as much as 100$ on an average.
Modern B2B data partners, in addition to the above traditional data, also try to provide behavioral data, proxy intent, better contact directories, and improved company firm-o-graphics information. They will personalize data for you. The sales intelligence will be customized for you based on your needs, the persona you are targeting. A right B2b data partner will have a global scale; maintain high data standards with capabilities to take care of personalized data requests.
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Tibor Shanto is a Pre-Discovery Specialist driving conversion & pipeline creation via improved execution. He helps B2B companies translate sales strategy to reality and was often called a brilliant sales tactician, obsessed with implementation.
Tibor helps sellers align their process with buyers' decision and buying process. He specializes in prospecting and communicating value in a way that drives access to and action from decision-makers. Tibor makes his clients regularly see a double-digit increase in opportunities and pipeline values. He works with companies from Fortune 50 to start-ups achieve their revenue goals.
Tibor Shanto at B2B Binge 4th edition focused on three mistakes most sales reps make while prospecting on the telephone. The three mistakes he mentioned are, most of the time, easily overlooked by most sales reps.
1. Accept who you are: It means understanding who you are and what do you represent. Understand what you are set out to do every day. Develop an understanding of your prospect and treat them as such. Your prospects are trying to do fit a lot in a day. Your call will interfere in their plan. Make their time worthwhile when they agree to talk to you. You should know that you are not the only meddling in their business. Therefore, develop an understanding of the challenges your prospect might be facing.
2. There is nothing social about telephone prospecting: Think in a counter-intuitive manner. Understand that you are going to interfere in someone's schedule. They are also wanted to end those interferences and get back to what they were doing. So take a look from the customer point of view and understand what is of value to them.
3. Expand your toolkit: The one who is prospecting has to understand that the channel you are comfortable with that may not be the case with your prospect. Not everybody thinks like you. Contact the lead through the channel they are pleased with. So you have to expand your expertise across various channels.
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Leslie is the Vice President, Global Campaigns, and Field Marketing at Twilio Inc. She has in-depth experience in Program Management/Management and proven success in planning and implementing worldwide channel partner programs and high-impact sales training programs to support strategic business initiatives. Leslie is also a great speaker, mentor, and trainer.
Ampliz invited her to the 4th edition of the B2B Binge event as one of the keynote speakers. She shares her journey from the beginning of 2020 in the campaign management and how the sudden changes like pandemic changed the way they functioned. Leslie also shares the critical learning she and her team acquired over the period.
Here are some of the lessons:
1. Virtual reality is not a physical reality, so people may not understand your offering.
a. Content is crucial. Keep it simple, compelling, and brief.
b. Keep a check on your promotion strategy
c. Keep your target audience engaged
2. A virtual world is a self-service world, and engagement has to be reimagined.
a. Manage the weird and have a strategy for engagement
b. Deliver an experience on par with a physical event
c. Get creative leverage your technology or product
3. In a virtual world, be thoughtful, be inclusive, and be fun.
a. Think beyond business goals to the time you are engaging your audience
b. Hug the opportunity across geographies and time zones to reach new audiences
c. Reach out, partner, share and learn.
Apart from these, she shares different learning about managing teams and works virtually.
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JD GERSHBEIN has supported professionals and companies seeking a greater understanding of how LinkedIn works and how they can harness the site's full potential. He is a pioneer LinkedIn strategist, a widely-acknowledged thought leader, and a dedicated educator who acts as a facilitator of learning and brings the importance of personal branding to bear, especially in COVID-19 times. Drawing upon his background in marketing, psychology, neuroscience, broadcasting, and performance art, JD finds his passion for connecting people to new knowledge and new opportunities.
An early adopter of LinkedIn, JD has grown along with the medium, becoming one of its leading proponents. Transitioning from his traditional marketing practice, he rose to prominence as a LinkedIn profile writer and corporate trainer, before establishing himself as one of the most vivid and exciting personalities on the business speaking circuit. Through his events, writings, teachings, and broadcast media contributions, JD leads by example, inspiring people in all walks of firm striving to make their mark in the Digital Age.
At the B2B Binge event, he shares how one can leverage virtual networking to
1. PIVOTING WITH PURPOSE: The coronavirus crisis has virtualized business, increased stress levels, and imposed new demands on our time and attention. LinkedIn, in combination with Zoom, has become our lifeline. JD is finely attuned to the pain felt by so many who, for whatever reason, cannot extract value from LinkedIn, are stuck on how to tell their story best, or cannot fathom the technology. He continues his commitment to minimizing this pain.
2. LEVERAGING LINKEDIN TO RECLAIM BUSINESS MOMENTUM: Nothing like a global pandemic to derail the plans of businesspeople who had so much on the line and cloud the vision of a bright future. JD offers best-in-class LinkedIn training for companies struggling to execute their strategic plan and keep their teams engaged while working remotely.
3. DESIGNING THE LINKEDIN PROFILE THAT REFLECTS YOU IN THE NEW NOW: As one of the first independent LinkedIn consultants in the world, JD understands what it takes to communicate a value proposition through an online profile. He embraces a design thinking approach to LinkedIn profile writing, which positions his clients for the best possible impression and is engineered with their desired outcomes in mind.
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Kate has more than 15 years of tech experience building strong businesses within different stages and industries. She believes deeply in bringing businesses to life in prospects and customers’ hearts and minds by creating compelling and consistent messaging throughout the customer life cycle. I have faith in its criticality for any business to bring the customer’s voice to every aspect of their business marketing, product, customer success, customer service, finance, and alignment with your customer. The customer experience doesn't begin when they make a purchase, sign the contract, or complete a transaction. It starts the first time they've heard your name.
At B2B Binge 4.0, she spoke elaborately on not only how to align different departments and speak the same language but also make it actionable. There is no point in aligning if you cannot take action around it.
To align all the departments to customers' needs, you have to listen to them ardently. When you listen to them carefully, the departments will understand what needs to be done. These actions will most likely be aligned to customer needs rather than personal goals. When you achieve customer goals and intend to provide delight to them, you will go beyond what is expected of you.
To go beyond expectations it needs more action. Alignment with customers not only provides avenues to take action but also opportunities for taking meaningful action. The effort that aligns businesses and their customer not only externally but also internally. To internalize alignment, it starts with the 1st point of contact, i.e., social media, events, referral, and other channels to post-closure of deals like feedback, upsell and cross-sell systems, and customer re-engagement tactics.
2020 is a revenue era. All actions taken by various departments have to align with how they are aiding in generating revenue by providing delight, not just by cutting costs. Investment in customer delight digitally is crucial for success in 2020. The customer has to grow with you. Therefore, CLTV matters. The realtime conversations matter. It has to be personalized. Customers expect brands to understand them and ask you to deliver how you know them and understand their needs.
The experiences have to be unified and omnichannel. Anyone who delivers these will be a winner because it is a different level of customer experience. The customer experience should have synergy across all the departments. There should be a single source of truth that brings alignment across the organization. The faster and smoother is the flow of leads to deals better it is. The conversions are only possible through conversations and mapping customer needs. This map has to be synced across the organization to have meaningful conversations.
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Camila Kaul is a passionate thought leader focused on digital consulting through insights and storytelling to create breakthrough, innovative digital strategies for companies. She is the head of Strategy and Sales Development for Google. She is also the founder of Just as Squiggle.
As one of the keynote speakers at the B2B Binge event, she focused on how a problem-solving mindset can solve the organizations’ most significant problems more thoroughly. She goes on to say that 35% of the skills are obsolete. If people do not upgrade their skills and get creative, more are likely to lose jobs or modes of earning.
Creativity is the most critical skill that can hold on its own. Creative people can thrive and flourish under challenging conditions. Creative thinking comes from practicing small steps of creativity and being open to ideas.
Unlearning and relearning becomes a vital part of the creative process. As people age, they lose the creative edge. The key reason behind it is acquiring a restrictive mindset and having conflicting thoughts before taking any action. It makes them risk-averse and prevents them from taking up challenges.
How do you decide which challenge to take up or face?
Before facing or taking up any challenging task, we usually ask the following questions and don't take it up. They are:
1. What if we do something weird?
2. What if we exaggerate the rules?
3. What is the opposite of the rule?
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Harris is the founder of Harris Consulting Group. He is one of the top leaders in Inside sales. He is a keynote speaker and trainer. Harris trains salespeople on Full-Funnel Sales and provides Operational Guidance. He teaches from SDRs with no sales experience to AE's with years of experience under their hood and the Customer Success Reps on how to upsell and cross-sell.
Harris helps organizations in streamlining their Sales Operations and Sales Process. He creates, audits them with recommendations that will speak to the unique use case and provide the right feedback and guidance.
He was one of the key speakers invited to the US version of the 4th edition of the B2B Binge Event. He helped us, and the ones who attended the event, understand customers at a psychological level. He unraveled the mystery of what goes in the customer’s head when they are looking to buy.
Richard sheds light on why buying is an emotional journey. He explains the three ego states of buying.
a. The child ego state (The emotional state): I want it. It is this egotistical state where all the decision originates.
b. The adult ego state (The rational you): Weighing the decisions to pros vs. cons. It gives the customer a reason to go ahead and make a purchase or book a meeting.
c. The Parent Ego State (The critical self): it aids in choosing something morally excellent vs. evil. It helps focus on what is ethically right vs. what is immoral.
When a salesperson understands these ego states, it becomes easier for the individual to act like a child, adult, or a parent to a customer based on the mutual understanding of the problem statement. And as the discussion moves ahead and the knowledge between the sales rep and the customer becomes better and better, the ego state also changes. Each of them holds a different role then. This evolution of function has to be very organic.
Most of the time, customer act like in a child ego state, but sales rep perceives it as parenting or the parent ego state. Salespeople have focus and listen very closely to understand the ego state your customer is in. Instead of rebelling or acting rebellious while understanding or negotiating a customer, try to understand each other and arrive at a better ego state to appeal to their Child ego state.
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Andrea Waltz is the Co-Author of the bestselling book, "Go for No!" an eminent Speaker and a Virtual Trainer. She is the founder of Courage crafters Inc.
At the B2B Binge event, she explains why a no is an opportunity made than an opportunity lost. What do you think about failure? How can you change the outlook about the loss?
She says, "Embrace the connection between the Yes and No." Yes, maybe the destination, it is 'No' that takes you there. A 'No' is a chance to improve and develop. Be authentic, and take feedback. When you take the input, you are going to hear a lot of NOs, but you will start building genuine relationships. In a business or career, authentic connections will take you farther in your career than anything.
Change the way you respond to rejection. Please take it as a possibility. No means not now. Seek feedback and the answer to why it was a no. Seek the chances of improvement. Rejection is not black and white. It is grey most of the time. Based on how you react to no, it can become an opportunity.
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What do sales and marketing teams need?
It is pretty obvious sales and marketing teams of any company just need growth and growth just comes from more revenue and more customers.
There are different stages in the funnel, at the top, you have the lead generation and you want to put as many leads as possible. Then you nurture it through your inbound marketing and other teams and then you want to close the deal. To make it even more obvious, you should have lead volume, so the more number of leads you put into the funnel, your funnel can get bigger. You can close more deals or you can increase the velocity which means the pace in which the lead moves through the funnel has to be expedited. So those are two ways in which you can make your funnel work better for you increase the size of the funnel or make it shorter and quicker.
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Turning Customers to Promoters Through Product Led Growth
There’s a slight problem as lead generation becomes a marketing responsibility. With the funnel that we have, we have a problem. Our customers are kind of leftover at the end, and we’re not thinking of them the way we should be. They have the power to be our most influential marketers or most helpful salespeople, and our most beneficial customer success people because they’re, you know, on the ground using your product, telling other people about it, thinking about when you buy something online these days, rarely do you not look at the reviews about it.
And those reviews are customers advocating for them. The product is not advocating for the product. And it’s a potent thing to activate your customers into being advocates for you. So we dropped the funnel a few years ago, and we said, you know, modern businesses, particularly in a product-led growth world, they use this flywheel approach.
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Journey into Passion economy
Passion economy is not hating your stupid boss and then becoming one. Many people think that, okay, I don’t like my boss. Let me just do a passion economy. Let me just jump into entrepreneurship. It is not that case.
You are going to work with someone even tougher. You will be the boss. You are not becoming a businessman. You are a businessman. So it’s different if your reason for quitting a nine to six job and then starting a passion economy is just because your boss or your work is getting a little boring, tired of all the office politics, maybe not the best, option according to me.
Maybe you can pick something else and think about what comes naturally. Well, so in that case, Am I asking you to quit your nine to six job and then jump into passion economy. Maybe not some for someone who is from India for whom the whole template is all generalized.
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The unanswered question: How do you attract the right talent?
The sales interview processes, in general, is never complete without touching this topic and then the capacity planning in general. So let’s get to the first one.
How do you attract the right talent? Now, there could be three different sales models in any organization. You know, when a company is pretty small, you’re thinking of a founder-led sales model with one or two salespeople. You want to make sure that you’re able to attract the right people.
Now is not the time to go on job boards. So as an organization, then you want to try your network. You want to make sure that you’re reaching out to your connections. You’re talking to your previous employers and seeing what sorts of people are there whom you could offer.
You talk to your investor network, LinkedIn groups, and communities, but don’t go to the job portal yet because, at an early stage, you need people who actually can hustle their way through, not so much a specialist in the initial stages.
When you grow the team slowly, with the sales model, it is just beginning with your two to five people. You need to have some predictability into what’s going to work for you. Rely on references from your employees heavily. That’s very important. They know what works at this organization, and they can help you find relevant people in no time.
Again, your network is the most important, keep on building and nurturing your connections. Business and startup communities are other ones. And if you look at the third one, which is when you have a well-defined sales process in place, then it’s where everything that you can think of comes in place, where all the sources, the job boards, the recruiters, the agencies, the LinkedIn and all of that comes in.
Now, you got to remember for startup founders, and it is imperative that you’ve got to build some thought leadership with time, as well as your company is growing. It’s equally essential to sort of attracting candidates mainly for this specific reason.
If you look at the tip, the top 1% of salespeople in any company are never looking out for jobs. I mean, these are the highest-paid employees. They probably, in some cases, earn more than the CEO. So they’re not looking out for jobs. They’re just doing very well. Their ex-bosses are calling them, and they always have a position available.
So unless there is something that attracts them with some thought leadership of some kind, it’s going to be hard for you to go back and look at what are the parameters to consider when hiring again to the new company.
Parameters of hiring a salespersonWhen you start hiring, you can divide it by a variety of parameters, depending on
What geography are you selling into? Are you selling an India, US, or Apac? Because cultural nuances can make much difference. - Laat meer zien
