Jill Rowley, social selling evangelist, talks with host Jen Spencer about the evolution of sales and the big changes coming down the pike in the latest episode of The Allbound Podcast.
What do you do as a social selling evangelist?
I didn’t start as a social selling evangelist. I tell people I’m a sales professional trapped in a marketer’s body. I spent two years at Salesforce, and then a decade on quota at Eloqua, and my buyer was marketing. It was about 2012 when I started to develop this reputation for what we were defining as “social selling”. I didn’t know it was a thing, I was just using social networks like Linkedin and Twitter to be where my buyers were and find out information about those buyers.
I wanted to understand the world of my buyers. If I was going to be teaching them that they should be using this channel in marketing programs, I needed to understand it, and for me to understand it, I needed to use it. So it just became part of my toolkit as a sales professional.
How has the landscape changed since you were in that sales role, leveraging social media platforms to help you drive your sales process?
We’re using these social networks to do research on the buyer, the buying committee and the sphere of influence of the buyer. The thing about social selling that has me worried is people thinking it’s just a new technique, or just a new tactic or tool, because it’s so much more than that. Sales transformation is what needs to be occurring much more broadly than social selling. The reason is the buyer has changed more in the past 10 years than the past 100 years. Marketing has been evolving, but sales hasn't. No one really likes to buy product and we don't even really want to buy solutions. We want outcomes.
What impact do you think outsourced marketing and social automation have had on sales and marketing?
I recently had a call with an amazing company that is approaching $10B revenue, and I was speaking with the leader of the inbound SDR team. He said their playbook is a 10-year-old playbook, and it includes that every inbound gets 10 touches. Five calls, five emails. Every software company on the planet it seems, is running the same playbook, and so you have millions of salespeople making millions of calls, and sending millions of emails. More isn't better, more relevant is better. One of the things we teach is incorporating social into your mix.
So with this gentleman, I sent him a personal invite to connect on Linkedin, I followed him on Twitter. I retweeted something he tweeted, and he had shared a post on Linkedin, and I had commented on it. So when I sent him an email, I referenced the post that he had shared on Linkedin. I’d already made a pretty significant impression on him, because I had done research to be relevant, to build a relationship. But social is fluid. It is really difficult for sales leaders to wrap their heads around the fact that it isn't a channel that can be outsourced or automated. It has to be a behavior that’s taught. There's fluidity, not rigidity, in social.
What should sales and marketing professionals be doing to better serve their buyers?
How do you understand what’s relevant and what will resonate with those contacts in those specific accounts? How do you do personalized messaging and content? How do you orchestrate all that? This is a more educational approach to marketing, and it’s helpful to the buyers. It’s a lot of leading with the customers’ stories. I don't want to buy a product, I don't want to buy a solution, I want outcomes. I want to see people like me in the same job role, at a similarly sized company, in a similar industry doing what you're telling me I need to do with your product.
Where do you see the B2B sales profession headed in the next two years?
I think a lot more will be demanded of the sales professional. For a buyer to be willing to engage with a sales professional, there's going to have to be way more value exchange, and a whole lot more value exchange up front for them to invest any of their time.
The modern seller needs to be able to communicate very effectively because she’s going to have to get a group of people on a buying committee from cross functions to collaborate internally and reach consensus. Beyond that she has to think ecosystem, and how her solution fits into the overall ecosystem of the customer's world. She’s got to be tech savvy and social oriented. It’s frightening how little sales leaders are doing today to prepare their sales organization to sell the way that customers want to buy.
Speed Round Questions:
Learn how to vet, engage and grow partnerships with Lisa Box, Vice President of Business Development at WP Engine, in the latest episode of The Allbound Podcast, hosted by Jen Spencer.
How do you vet potential partners? What traits are you looking for?
The number one trait to look out for is values – specifically whether a potential partner’s corporate core values align with your company’s. Are your visions the same? What are your shared objectives? When partners aren’t about the win-win strategies, they are ultimately setting themselves up for failure. If their values and cultures align with yours, it’s a solid indicator of future success.
Have you ever experienced disconnect between partners in your organization?
Absolutely. It’s not because of ill will or not a good partnership, it’s that certain values don’t align. I’ve learned to look for good identifiers.
Have you been in a position that you’ve had to turn a partner away?
I’ve had to let existing partners go or had to postpone partnerships just because it was not the right time. Maybe the opportunities we originally thought may exist just did not exist at that point. Never be afraid of saying, “I don’t know if this is going to work.” Or “This is awesome so let’s keep going forward!”
How do you make sure your business development strategy rings through the entire organization?
One initiative that’s been very effective is looking at our core values, mapping out how the partnership will work and whether it supports each of our core values. This check-in tells us if a partnership is a good fit, if the timing is right time and whether this will help us achieve our overall vision.
What are some strategies you’ve implored to successfully onboard a new partner?
There is no partner program more important than your own. What we’ve done is approach onboarding in phased, digestible pieces. When you try to do too much all at once it can become a burden to a partner. Phasing onboarding into a step-by-step process is usually where we see the best benefit in getting partners onboarded.
What do you think keeps your partners engaged? How can you ensure a quality partnership between your organization and theirs?
Two things–one is the relevancy of the product you are providing and the second is the communication of that value. Make sure people understand what you are doing for them, how you are helping them with their clients and overall business impact. Then keep them up-to-date on business trends that can also help their company. It takes time but showing your value in their daily lives is how you become invaluable to your partners.
What kind of changes have you seen in the last decade of sales?
It blows my mind how many changes in inbound and inside sales have occurred - it has been extremely confusing but also full of huge opportunities. I think one of the ways to really disrupt is with an effective channel strategy. Sales acceleration tools are so helpful, especially the distribution of knowledge that social and video bring to educate consumers so they are ready to go as sales engage.
Speed Round Questions:
Jared Fuller, VP of Business Development and Partnerships at PandaDoc, joins Jen Spencer to share how he scaled the channel program at PandaDoc from less than 1% of total revenue to over 13% in his first six months at the company.
What are a few key strategies you’ve implemented to make PandaDoc’s channel program such a success?
I reached out to channel leaders who have built something from scratch with a similar SaaS portfolio. I berated Pete Caputa, the VP of Sales at Hubspot, and convinced him to join our board of advisors and get on a weekly call with me. I found someone who was much better than me at building a channel program.
When it comes to boosting inbound leads, what types of content are you producing to do that, and what has been the biggest driver for PandaDoc?
There are two types of partners at PandaDoc that I’m responsible for: our channel program and our strategic alliances. How we drive inbound traffic is by co-hosting events ––thought leadership webinars, where we’ll bring out a topic, for instance, “The Sales Enablement Stack: How to Build a Process from Lead to Close.” We’ll evaluate best practices with a partner like Close.io. They bring the thought leadership on how to make sure deals don’t fall through in the pipeline and we’ll supplement it with how to put together the right content, how to send the right proposal, how to customize the content, etc., and we’ll deliver that to both of our customer bases and generate leads. Co-marketing for us has been key. It makes sense to do those same type of events with our channel partners.
How did you get your sales team bought-in to the PandaDoc vision?
I screen candidates for vision. I believe if you can’t find alignment in vision the rest of the deal is dead. I typically paint a very clear vision of why I believe in PandaDoc and see if they feel the same. We’re documents, which could be the most boring thing in the world, but if you can get excited about changing something that hasn’t been different since Microsoft Word launched 30 years ago...if you believe in that, the rest is incumbent upon the team and the process to ensure they’re successful.
How did you empower them to exceed quota?
I’ve come to realize there’s a massive difference between management and leadership. Management does things right. Leadership does the right things. I’m a horrible manager, but what I know I’m great at is trying to imbue a vision and a sense of passion, urgency and desire upon the people I work with. If you don’t have those, let’s part ways. So we’ve been doing a lot of training around that empowerment piece. They understand that the people who are successful at PandaDoc are doers.
For sales leaders trying to grow their strategic partnerships, what tips can you share with them?
When you’re starting a partner program, you have to understand people’s interests. You have your interests as a company, you have your partner’s interests, and you have your partner’s client’s interests. And of those, you think the best thing you can do is solve for your partner’s client’s interests. That is actually fundamentally flawed. You have to focus on your partner’s interests. How can you help them grow their business?
Want to hear more from Jared? Don't miss out — listen to the rest.
Tiffani Bova, Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce, joins Jen Spencer to talk about empowering sales teams in the SaaS industry in this episode of The Allbound Podcast.
Tell us what you do as a Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist.
My number one focus every day is around customer success and evangelizing ways in which companies can leverage technology in new ways and reimagine the organization that is responsible for selling and bringing products to market. And more importantly, the entire experience that’s created by brands. Growth and innovation are the two things that many companies are focused on today, whether it’s a small business, medium or enterprise. So this was a great way for me to align to the broader remit that people were looking to accomplish this year.
What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen in sales over the years?
For anyone who knows me, knows I love to call myself a recovering seller. What has really changed for me – and this may be cliche today – is that the customer really is different than they ever were even 10 years ago. When I was selling, people only had a PC on their desk, they didn’t have them at home. Not everyone had a cell phone and they would turn off that connection when they went home. But now there’s more power in the hand of the consumer than there was on their desk 10 years ago.
So much is being generated by this connection between social, mobile, cloud and information. And the speed at which that technology is changing has reshaped the way consumers interact with technology and the way in which they conduct commerce between themselves and a brand. And that was the catalyst for people to then change the way they wanted to consume and sell in their business lives. I think the learnings from B2C are what is really accelerating and challenging sales from a process perspective.
What do you think will continue to shape the way in which sales organizations function and succeed in this modern environment?
We get caught up in ‘technology is going to solve all the problems we’ve been facing.’ Technology to me is the enabling tool to help facilitate changes in people and process. If you just deploy technology, and you don’t rethink the metrics you’re tracking, the information you are able to gather, the kinds of behaviors that change because of the information gathered, how you should be allocating resources, etc. –– all of that has implications. If you just deploy technology to manage the team better and have more metrics, the relationship between the sales rep and that technology is not one of love. It’s more viewed as big brother, and that’s a people/process shift that should happen in tandem with any kind of deployment of technology.
We’ve seen how effective a customer-led sales organization can function, are more organizations starting to embrace this? How do you see them implementing it?
This is a big challenge. When you make a decision to put the customer at the true north of the decisions you make as an organization, you have to understand the gap between an executive making that decision and a person in the line of fire such as a customer service representative or a sales rep. They need to understand what it means to them.
If we’re going to become more customer centric, what does it change in my daily life? Do we do things differently, or are we just saying it and I’m behaving the same way. If you don’t have that connection point between strategically at the executive level and the entire company doesn’t understand what does that mean to their job, then you’ve really set yourself up for disappointment. You’ve got to get everyone rallied behind it. And it has to become a drumbeat of communication and engagement with all employees, because it really is about changing a mindset. And that is far more difficult than deploying new technology.
It will take mindset, executive sponsorship, and inspiring the entire organization to understand what it means to be a customer-centric company.
A couple of years ago you wrote a piece about how technology sales reps have “lost their mojo.” Since then have you noticed sales leaders getting better about empowering their sellers? Have the tech sales reps gotten their mojo back?
A lot of that had to do with finding a new way while still maintaining the things that made them (sales people) successful in the past. You can’t just forget everything, but you have to be willing to unlearn things we’ve done and relearn by using some of the new capabilities. While we’ve spent a lot of time helping the sales rep be a better seller, I think where we’ve got a blind spot is with the sales managers and they’re the ones that are working every day to teach and coach.
What’s the one thing an executive can do today to empower their sales managers?
Unfortunately, we live and die by metrics, and until leadership starts to say, “Hold on. If we’re really going to become a customer-driven organization, that can’t be the only thing we track.” Sales leaders have to start to think about the long-term game ––instead of going from lead to cash, you have to go from lead to advocacy.
If you want a customer to not only buy from you, and also become a raving fan and advocate on your behalf...it’s going to take more time. And if you’re held to the same metrics, it’s going to be really difficult. Sales managers have to work with their managers to advocate for more coaching and mentoring. Mindset is a huge component here and sales managers and leaders have to lead that charge by working with their team downstream different.
Have you noticed a shift in tech companies building their own reseller channels as opposed to going through large distributors?
You have to be able to solve against, who is the target customer at the end user level, and how does that end user actually like to buy the technology you sell? You can’t solve to everything, especially if you’re a small company, but you have to look for those hot spots. What are those two to three channels that satisfy the highest percentage of demand from your target end user? That’s how you develop your indirect or your go-to market strategy. It’s the “Bermuda Triangle of Segmentation.”
Speed round questions:
Favorite city? Somewhere in Hawaii
Animal lover…yes or no? Yes
Mac or PC? Both
Uber or Lyft? Uber
All expenses paid trip to where? I’d stay home!