Jul 1, 2019
There are 4 main parts to a successful outbound campaign: List Optimization, Email, Phone, and Social Media. Sure, you could argue paid media might also fall into this as a channel, but let's stick to the basics. This episode 022 with Blake Johnston, CEO at OutboundView, is less focused on messaging and more focused on reducing friction within the tools and channels that help us have conversations. There is a category of technology called "Sales Acceleration" tools that the IT Channel needs to understand, because they can drastically transform your ability to connect with buyers to drive attendance to events, webinars, and other key marketing content for the purposes of educating buyers on complex IT solutions.
01:30 - Recap episode 017 with Blake Johnston on "Personalized
Content Promotion", which is using Inside Sales resources to drive
attendance to events, webinars, and to get engagement on content
like white papers, recorded video, or
demos.
02:00 - This episode is a partial case study, since Aaron and Blake
did pilot for an IT manufacturer/ reseller in May 2019. What did we
learn? In this episode we will put it into 4 parts: list building,
email, phone, and social media.
04:00 - List building/ data cleaning fundamentals. Inside Sales
team get ZoomInfo or DiscoverOrg lists. Even if the data is good,
still need to do levels of validation. First, who are the specific
contacts and job titles? Are some contacts a higher priority than
others? Second, for events in a few weeks, how many people can you
really engage? So second level validation, have people call all the
way through the list to figure out direct line/ extension. THEN,
third, put the sales team after everyone has been called
through.
06:30 - Phone: Auto Dialing and tools that help have more
conversations about your events and marketing. Let's say you only
have one Sales person. First, that person could just manually dial,
which takes forever and is fatiguing. Second, take a a little more
automated approach by uploading leads to a tool that sits on top of
a Salesforce leads or contacts report. As soon as it dials, it
hangs up and moves to the next until you get a connect. Three, next
level of dialers, people are calling down the list (sometimes 4-6
contacts simultaneously) and the second a contact picks up, you get
the conversation in your ear. Some of these AI tools (like
"ConnectandSell") take the stance, "...if you're going to be
dialing, focus on conversations, not dialing itself". If event is
good enough, the messaging resonates with buyers, then the more
conversations you have the more you'll drive marketing
engagement.
09:30 - Have Execs sit on ConnectandSell and have conversations
(because they're not thrashing on the mechanics of dialing itself).
How much would you pay for your VP to talk to X-job title in exact
target market?
12:30 - Email: Outreach.io, a Sales Engagement technology for
emailing 1:1. How is this different than Marketing Automation
technologies? Making emails that look like they come from an actual
person in a multi-touch sequence. When you look in your "sent"
folder, you see them going out AND it's a consistent message so you
can pull data off the efforts.
17:00 - How using videos paired with LinkedIn+Phone+Email can work
together for Marketing to Drive attendance. Tools like Vidyard will
integrate with these efforts.
21:00 - Don't over-architect process and workflows, but rather know
your lists and audience and just start the outbound (making the
calls, emails, and social touches). Learn, and then iterate on the
first initiative. Closing remarks.