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Speaker 1: (00:00)
That's, uh, at two o'clock,

Speaker 1: (00:02)
Central, two central noon spec. Noon, noon Pacific. Ken's gotta eat lunch.

Speaker 3: (00:10)
Okay, we're at about five after, and by about, I mean, we're at five after. Um, so we can get started. Thanks everybody for joining. We appreciate you coming. Um, I just wanted to introduce myself really quickly. My name's Caitlin. I head up the sales enablement practice at Aptitude eight. We're here to discuss the topic, how to do more with less of a sales team. And with that, I'm excited to introduce c e o and founder Connor Jeffers and Outreach SDR manager, Ken Ahmar. And with that, I'll pass it over to you, Connor.

Speaker 1: (00:46)
Cool. Thanks, Caitlin. Um, I wanna jump to like the intro slide here. Nice. Uh, cool. I'm Connor for those of you, I, I see some folks that I recognize. Uh, and the attendee list, for those of you that I don't know, uh, I run App SU eight. Um, we're a consulting firm, uh, and an outreach implementation partner. And, uh, really what we do is we work with customers, uh, on technology to help them with marketing, sales, and customer success. Um, we describe ourselves as kind of a rev op consulting firm, um, but for anyone unfamiliar with the term, really what we do is we help companies, uh, that are B2B build revenue engines, and we bring sort of both the strategy expertise as well as the technical expertise to help people do that. Uh, and outreach happens to be one of our favorite platforms that we love to work with. Um, and with that, I will give it to you, Ken, uh, to give a little bit of, of your background and your intro, uh, as well.

Speaker 2: (01:40)
Awesome. Hi everyone. My name is Kenmar. Um, I'm an S c R manager here at Outreach. Um, I started at Outreach in 2018. I was the S c R of the year. Um, and in 2019, I was our onboarding manager. So I was responsible for, uh, training, onboarding, uh, new hires and new s scr, uh, onto our platform. And most recently, um, our, I'm our S C R manager for our emerging market segment, which is our smb, uh, market segment and lead a team about four team leads and about 30 SCRs across our, uh, emerging segment.

Speaker 1: (02:14)
In, in short, Ken really knows sales and STR and sales process, uh, which is why he's here with us today. Um, cool. Well, we'll jump into the first topic. I think a good place to probably start is kind of like, why are sales teams having to do more with less resources? Um, and then we'll sort of jump into what, what that means and tactically how it might be affecting some of your businesses, uh, and what you guys can do about it.

Speaker 2: (02:37)
Awesome. I think there, um, there's two main reasons, right? Uh, the first one is the increase number of tools available. Um, so like the basic tech stack for any sales rep would be a crm, a sales engagement platform, and a data provider. But there's a ton of other tools available. You have call recording software like Gong, you have video prospecting platforms, tons of other lead providers. And all of these tools are designed to make reps a lot more efficient. And then obviously have, you know, the big elephant in the room. Covid, uh, COVID has impacted our business, our market segment tremendously. Um, it's forced us to become a leaner team, a lot more scrappier and, uh, to do more with what we have, right? And any sales leader will tell you, Connor, that, um, even in times like this, um, you know, with Covid and the Global Pandemic, um, our goals don't actually change, right? They stay the same if not get higher. Um, and now we have less reps to achieve those goals.

Speaker 1: (03:35)
I think the other thing that, that we're seeing as well is there's a higher per rep cost for teams, um, which is burdened by a lot of the tools that they Ken described as well, right? So not only do you have sort of your fixed salary costs for sales reps and then sort of variable commissions, but the individual cost of, of having a sales rep due to the number of tools is you have to pay for a Salesforce license. You have an outreach license, you have a Gong license, you've got, uh, clear bits, ZoomInfo, discover org, whatever other tools in your sales stack that you're looking at. Um, and as a result, like teams are looking at this and saying, because it's more expensive on a per rep basis, um, how can we sort of manage that team size down, um, and often invest more in technology.

Speaker 1: (04:12)
Um, the other thing that we're seeing is we work with finance leads, executive leads, um, or CEOs is a higher, uh, and blended demand gen budgets. And so it's happening as we're seeing that teams are looking at not just, here's my sales cost and my sales budget, but what's my overall go-to-market budget, um, and how much am I going to spend across sales, technology, demand, gen spend, marketing hires, and looking at that as a total blended cost of generating new business. And as a result, um, everyone's kind of competing for that same budget, and the number of sales team members that people are able to hire goes down. Um, which inevitably means that our sales teams have to get more effective and more efficient, because as Ken's so accurately noted, uh, the number doesn't change, uh, despite the, the number of headcount that we can throw out the problem going down as well.

Speaker 2: (05:01)
Awesome. Uh, so what roles do the modern sales team have? Connor,

Speaker 1: (05:08)
I'll let you take the first one of that, man.

Speaker 2: (05:09)
Awesome. You know, um, so the first one, hunters, um, these are xdr like BDRs, uh, SDRs, MDRs really responsible for, uh, hunting for new business prospecting and qualifying leads.

Speaker 1: (05:23)
And I think the, the second one that we're seeing a lot of everyone's really familiar with is just sellers. So that's gonna be AEs, uh, accounting executives and smaller organizations, really sometimes a hybrid, uh, of leadership. Um, somebody who's sort of dipping into the closing seat in addition to, uh, some of their other responsibilities. Um, and on the leadership side, we're actually seeing a lot of CEOs at earlier stage organizations or VPs of sales directors, sales managers, depending on the company size, taking on this position as well. Um, we're typically seeing demand gen be as involved in the sales team. So I'm sure if you guys are on the sales side, you probably hear a lot from your demand gen leads, like, are you calling my MQs? Where are they at? Are they moving through the process? Uh, and they're carrying a lot and contributing to that goal.

Speaker 1: (06:08)
Um, and then sales ops is something that even just a couple of years ago is relatively new and is now becoming more standard. A lot of organizations, uh, and whether that's something that folks have in-house, as somebody who's dedicated to optimizing and managing the sales process, um, or they're working with an external firm to help them with that exercise, uh, it's something that we're seeing be core to that overall team. Um, and really the sales team is expanded in its scope, uh, despite the number of sellers decreasing, um, which is sort of why we think that there's a lot of opportunity, uh, for folks even with smaller teams to, to get better results.

Speaker 1: (06:44)
So I think the, the next piece is how does this actually work in practice? Um, and so I'll, I'll sort of take the first piece of this, but assembly line sales is a concept that w we use a lot at a, to just kind of describe, um, how we look at modern sales teams and modern sales process. And we think that, uh, outrage being a tool that we really like, uh, and any of the other sort of sales engagement tools also help execute on this and the tools in the stack, which is how do we manage the process? How do we hand things off between each one of these people and how do we make sure that we're moving in the direction that we want to go and things are getting better? And so really that starts with, um, our leaders who are going to be, whether they're, they're the sales leaders, whether they're executive leaders, really setting the strategy, defining that target audience and saying, what are we going after? How are we going after it? Um, the sales ops piece, which we sort of described as as building that assembly line, but really designing the floor plan. How did all the different machines connect? What is our business process? How, how fast can we go? How do we prevent ourselves from dropping things? How do we make sure this whole machine is constantly working and it's producing more output as we go? Um, and I'll give it to Ken on the demand gen and, and the hunter space.

Speaker 2: (07:54)
Awesome. So we've got the factory floor, right? And demand gen, they're responsible for feeding the line, right? Um, so I can speak for us here at Outreach. Um, we have a fantastic demand gen team producing a lot of continent, a lot of, uh, webinars and white papers specifically for that target audience, right? They're feeding top of funnel. Um, they pass these leads over to the hunters who actually process these items. Um, they're responsible for qualifying the leads, I'm adding value and then passing these qualifying leads in meetings over to the sellers.

Speaker 1: (08:26)
And I think when we get to sellers, really, uh, and for some smaller organizations, this could be leadership. The VP of sales could jump on to big deals, but really what we see is the majority of organizations having dedicated account executives and selling people who, when we sort of say pack boxes and puts them on the truck, really tying up that deal at the end of the day so that once we have that warm, warm prospect, they've made it through our sales process, they've had the meetings booked, and now we're really negotiating a contract and moving forward with an actual deal. Um, and typically we're seeing that between all of these folks. We really look at this is this is what the modern sales team looks like. And a lot of people sort of carve this up into individual groups, but one of the reasons that we're seeing the number of reps people have at their disposal shrink is because we're seeing the number of roles in the overall headcount of that team expand to encompass more parts of the overall sales process.

Speaker 2: (09:17)
Awesome. And, and so how do we actually get more done with less sellers?

Speaker 1: (09:26)
So I think for the, the first piece of this is really the marketing and sales handoff, um, becomes the most important part. Uh, I think the area where with our customers, we see the biggest drop, um, in performance is when marketing's doing a ton of stuff to generate demand. They're running webinars, they're publishing white papers, they're creating landing pages. People are filling out the forms. But the, the issue is that if those leads make it to sales, by the time they get there, they may lack the right contexts. The time might be take too long before they're able to follow up on it. They're not able to really engage with those prospects in any meaningful way. Uh, and more importantly, marketing is constantly saying like, Hey, did you call these, what's happening? My, my speed delete goes down, as Ken knows, I'm sure from his team that they constantly get asked and harass by the marketing folks.

Speaker 1: (10:11)
But the reality is, is that the, the, the marketing and sales handoff is the most important piece of this. And so really where we see really tactical, uh, exercises that can improve this is to really ask yourself where do, where do my sales reps go to see the leads? They should be working right now? Um, and how do I go and, and view those somewhere? How do I have a defined list that says, this is the number one priority records that you need to be reaching out to? And if that's in your c r m, if it's something that you can sync up to something like an outreach and automate manage, there's tons of value there as well. But one of the most important questions is how do my reps surface those? Um, something else we really like is seeing, uh, folks use tools that allow them to leverage task priority, um, and manage what, what outreach and, and Ken and his team describe as sort of a playlist of sales actions that make it really, really easy for your sales team to know exactly what they should be doing and when.

Speaker 1: (11:05)
And the biggest reason for this is time waste that in people incur from wondering, what should I do next? And going and hunting through the CR r m for records, maybe looking through my sent emails from last week, who should I follow up with? What should I do? Um, and the more that we can eliminate that task and really take care of a lot of that thought process for our teams, that they can just focus on doing what they do best, which is having meaningful conversations with customers, uh, and really driving things forward. Um, if you wanna add anything to that, Kenton, you can feel free, I can jump down to the next thing.

Speaker 2: (11:36)
Definitely. One thing I, I do want to add though, in terms of like time efficiencies, right? Um, the beautiful thing about outreach, uh, our S SCRs login every day and they're able to execute all their tasks, um, all their calls in one go, all their emails in one go, and you kind of hit it on the head. Um, there's a lot of efficiency in time gains and, uh, executing like things in, uh, buckets.

Speaker 1: (11:57)
Cool. I think the second thing that we see a lot, um, when we do a lot of CRM implementations, or we audit a lot of sales processes as well with some of our, our private equity and venture partners, but something that we see happen a lot is, uh, leading contact stages being something that, uh, don't really tell us very much about what should happen next. And I think, uh, anyone who's either worked with, uh, a new sales leader or hired on a new sales leader, one of their favorite things to do is immediately go and overhaul, uh, all of the opportunity stages and our lead statuses. And so I, we think that that's really important. Um, we really think that when we look at a, a stage or a status, um, it should really inform us what should we be doing next? And not just be a bucket to dump things into and to really inform us that if we look at records and we see which status they're in, we know exactly the next thing we need to do to move them further in the process.

Speaker 1: (12:44)
Um, and tools like outreach can do an amazing job of automating a lot of those data updates as well, um, furthering and minimizing some of the, the manual activity that our sales team does, but more importantly, ensuring our data's accurate so we can constantly sort of be making updates and progress. Um, one of the other things that, on that we really like to do with this number three item is really map out what that journey looks like. Um, if you and your team have not sat down and actually drawn out, how do we move people through our process? What is our lead statuses look like? What are the journey that people go through and how does someone become a customer of our organization? Um, a diagram that where your reps can really reference and see and know where they're at in the process goes a really long way.

Speaker 1: (13:25)
Um, it's something we start all of our engagements with, whether we're designing new systems or overhauling them, but I, I encourage every sales or every marketing leader to really sit down and do this, because one, it'll help you discover maybe areas where there's gaps, there's drop-offs, things take longer than they should, um, but also give you something to both help you train and onboard new hires, as well as give your existing team context on where they're at in their overall process. Um, I'm, I'm not sure if that's something that you include in some of your new hire training or anything on that end, Ken, or how you guys get people up to speed on what the sales process is. But obviously outreach is, sales process is extremely tight and you guys have given a lot of attention to it.

Speaker 2: (14:04)
Definitely. Yeah. We do include like a diagram of the entire, you know, customer journey as

Speaker 1: (14:09)
Well. Cool. I think that's super important. Uh, and if, if Ken and his team are doing it, I'd, I'd recommend you guys to as well. Um, the next piece, and then I'll, I'll stop talking and give Ken a turn, I promise, uh, is managing, um, CRM decay, which we really look at as the, the number of records you have in your system of who, who's unengaged, who hasn't come and interacted with any of the marketing materials. How do we actually reengage those people? How do we pull them in, whether it's into our marketing automation system or do some nurturing so that our sales people aren't going trying to bang down doors that nobody might be behind. Um, and really creating a process to both enrich data that you have in your system that could be years old and be outdated. It could have bad contact information.

Speaker 1: (14:49)
Um, if your sales reps are, you know, if you're hounding them to either put up bigger activity numbers, but every phone call that they make is hitting a disconnected line or the person doesn't work there anymore. Um, there's lots of ways to leverage technology to eliminate that waste and have them focus on the records that are actually qualified, um, and also understanding how that handle some of your contact opt-outs. And how do you make sure that when you have a conversation on the sales end, uh, are they asking for a full marketing optout? Are you passing that back to your marketing automation system? Um, or if they're asking to not be called anymore, can we ask for, Hey, that's totally fine. Uh, can we add you to our marketing list and continue to prospect into you? And once that person becomes reengaged, we follow back up with them. But really ensuring that we're creating both business process and then leveraging technology solutions to ensure that all of our CRMs are up to date. Um, so our sales team, when they're working records is confident that they're accurate, correct. And they're not just wasting their time because the, the number one resource that the sales team is gonna have is, is time in their day. Um, and with that, Ken, I'll give it to you.

Speaker 2: (15:51)
Awesome. And so next up is like really defining the users and roles, right? Um, uh, for example, like SDRs. Like what are their rules of engagement? Um, what is like their territory, their account base? Um, when an SDR starts an outreach, they're given a hundred, um, net new accounts to work, and that's their book of business. As they ramp up, they usually end with about 300 or 400 total accounts. And over the course of their lifetimes in S D R, they're responsible for generating, um, new, uh, business new pipeline on these 400 accounts. And really understanding like the workflows, really understanding the use cases for each of these 400 accounts in their segment and in their territory. Right. Uh, Connor, do you wanna hit a little bit on like the Salesforce, uh, rules and territories?

Speaker 1: (16:35)
I, something that I think that, that Ken touched on that's really valuable is really defining, um, I think with, especially if you look at like ABM strategies or having SDR teams target stuff, um, not just saying, Hey, you can go call anybody in the universe, uh, but really saying, here are the, here are the accounts you need to work, is gonna keep them laser focused, uh, on the things that we define as most valuable. And really that sales leader's responsibility is saying, what are those accounts? Which ones are we going after and why? Uh, but I think something to extend on is leveraging Salesforce outreach or other technology tools to really define those territories and make sure your team knows who they can go after and who they should be going after. Um, something we find a lot in organizations that we start working with is if you ask them, Hey, here are all these accounts we wanna launch an SD R program, um, is it's, okay, cool, which accounts are they going after?

Speaker 1: (17:23)
If they get a bite and they hook somebody, who are they booking the meeting for? Um, and the more accurate your c r m data is and really knowing who they're paired to, and something that we've seen be successful is either leveraging AE and SDR pairings, um, and assigning SDRs to specific AEs or team selling and really creating pods of people. Um, so everyone knows who they're booking with or something we've seem to be also really successful is just having really good CRM hygiene. So even if SDRs are working across multiple territories, multiple time zones, um, they always know that when they're actually able to book with somebody, they're, they're able to know who they're booking that meeting for and not spend a lot of time. And also creating disruption in your prospect experience of not knowing who someone's supposed to talk to next.

Speaker 2: (18:06)
And you kind of, um, you mentioned two things I I'd like to expand on Connor. Um, one is like equipping AEs with like pipeline they can execute against, right? Um, for example, here in outreach, um, if our new logo, pipeline quota or new logo, uh, quota is 50 K a month, the average AE will need, you know, four x that in pipeline to hit their number, right? So an S C R needs to produce at least 200 K in pipeline from their accounts to support their account executive, right? Um, and you also kind of mentioned a little bit, um, having like a really tight icp an ideal customer profile to execute against, right? Um, they're an outreach. We like to expand the idea of I CCP to really like workflows we support, right? The ICP for outreach would be another, um, high tech, you know, startup with a BDR and AE function. We know, um, how our SDRs prospect into them, um, the value props they use and our AEs know how to close those deals really well.

Speaker 1: (19:05)
Cool. Um, I think one of the next things to really jump into is, is leveraging sales automation. Uh, Ken is here from outreach, so obviously this is gonna be a big topic, but I think expanding past just outreach, something that we think is super important and we see people do is if you want your team to be more productive, leverage triggers for the repeatable actions. Um, so much of what the team does every day from when someone replies our, uh, ops out, they're checking off boxes to someone says, Hey, call me next week. And they're now going and creating a follow up task and managing all of this by, by having triggers in our systems, we're able to automate a lot of those actions so that a rep simply updates a single field or checks a single box or enrolls someone in a different sequence, and everything else can be dependent off of that.

Speaker 1: (19:48)
Um, and this is something that the, the sales ops role should really be owning in the organization and really focusing on how can I get my team to make more activities with a lower number of, uh, actions? And also how can I eliminate, uh, clicks and actions from my sales team's day? Because every time your sales team does anything that's not talking to a customer and progressing a deal, um, they're spending time on things that aren't a great use of their time. Uh, I think another piece of that would say, uh, if you, these don't just have to be limited to something like an outreach. Um, you can extend into Salesforce, you can extend into a marketing automation platform. Um, figure out ways and, and actions that your sales team spends time on. Uh, and then identify ways that you can automate those actions and your return will be immeasurable.

Speaker 2: (20:35)
Awesome. And so the next point, high customization on first touches and off the shelf, uh, subsequent touches. Um, what we mean by this is that, um, your allotment of time, if you put someone into sequence, um, you wanna spend the majority of your time upfront, right? Like 10, 15 minutes doing extra research, writing, uh, you know, a little bit better of an email. Um, cause all of the subsequent touches in any like sequence, um, are gonna bump that research. And any of the calls you make later on in a sequence, you can continuously reference that first email, that first, um, high customization you did.

Speaker 1: (21:10)
And I think one of the other things that we see people, uh, have a lot of success with, and I, I think I inadvertently touched on a little bit earlier, but is automated queuing of new prospects. Um, and really what that means is not only here's the high value list of records that your team needs to go work, but if you leverage sales automation, um, something that we see people do a lot is take our inbound MQs, which asset did they actually convert on? What was that asset and value prop we were speaking to, um, leveraging roles in the CRM to assign an ICP or a role or a persona to that record. And then using your sales automation tools to then move those people into sequences geared for that audience. And so that way, to Ken's point on some of the high customization, first touches, the rep can just log in and be served with, here's a list of high customization, first touches you need to manage, write those, hit send and you can just continue to crank through them instead of them constantly context switching, going back to the system, trying to figure out who they should be talking to next.

Speaker 1: (22:06)
The more you can leverage sales automation to actually dictate what your team should be doing, the more productive they're going to be able to be. Um, extending on that as well is reengage leads. If someone is you engaged with someone six months ago, uh, resurfacing a task for a sales rep to go and check in with that person and see where they're at. All of our lost opportunities, one of the biggest things that we see get left on the table with organizations that are just getting started with marketing or sales automation tools is there's this huge wealth of people that we've spoken to. Perhaps we've even demoed our product to. We've, maybe we've even established who the buyer is and then the conversation ended. They didn't buy from us for that day, and then we never talk to that person again. And the more that we can leverage, uh, automated re-engagement, the more we can make sure we're squeezing every single ounce of juice we can, um, outta the pipeline we have.

Speaker 1: (22:54)
And especially with, uh, folks whose businesses are affected by covid. If, if the juice still has to be just as much and you have less to squeeze, uh, the more we can get out, the more important. And I think it's Ken noted in the beginning, uh, the number doesn't change, which, which is always true from sales, it only goes up. Um, the last piece of this that I think is important as well is enriching data on record create. Um, one of the things that I even look at some of the, the sales activities we take on internally as an organization is a lead comes in and the first thing that someone's gonna go do is go look 'em up on LinkedIn, uh, go see what that person's doing, see what their role is. Maybe look at the company and the size and how many people are there.

Speaker 1: (23:34)
Uh, and that may only take a couple of minutes, but if you're doing that across hundreds of records a day, um, you're spending a tremendous amount of time on actions that can be totally automated. Um, every record that gets created in the system. Um, there is a wealth of technology tools that can add context, add enrichment. Um, there's native features in something like an outreach where right on that, that contact, you can get surfaced information about who that person is. And there's also tools you can leverage. And if you just even Google like data provider sales data providers, you'll find hundreds, uh, and obviously the big guys in the space with Clearbit and Discover org. Um, and there's so many options to be able to enrich that information and then more importantly, leverage it in personalization. Um, not only to Ken's point, are you doing high customization on those first touches, but if you leverage sales automation, um, you can be adding context into all of the communication you have.

Speaker 1: (24:28)
Um, some of the projects that we've done that I've seen be remarkably successful are when we're able to connect someone's Salesforce environment into say their, their software application. Um, and we can sync in information about when the last time someone logged in was what tools and features they access and which ones they haven't. And then we can use that data at a surface outreach communication to say, Hey Ken, I saw you haven't logged in in the last week or two. Um, most marketing people really are interested in our features that show different ABM profiles and lists, enrichment tools. Here's a case study specific to what you have and haven't done. Um, and leveraging that sales automation will keep your team focused on the opportunities that they can generate, uh, and less on, you know, how can I personalize this email or how can I add context? Um, and all of that can be automated to increase their time and their effectiveness.

Speaker 2: (25:24)
Awesome. So, uh, tool bag, um, this is kinda interesting. Um, here in outreach we use, um, like titles on LinkedIn, on LinkedIn sales nav, um, to really drive persona driven sequences, right? Um, our s e r team, our AE team reaching out to four main personas, uh, sales leadership, sales management, uh, marketing and revenue operations, a k a sales operations, right? Within these four persona sequences, um, we have kind of like a high-touch sequence and a low-touch sequence. Um, and by high-touch sequence, we mean a manual sequence. We kind of touched on this a little bit earlier. Um, this is an email you wanna put more time in upfront, and the low-touch sequences are a lot more automated where you can kind of just plug and play, right? Um, however, there's a lot of, uh, thought leaders on LinkedIn that say, Hey, look, personalized, personalized, personalized. But it's really important to equip your team with templates in these sequences, right? Right. We're not saying that the whole email should be templated, but, um, you want a template cause it gives you, um, a very consistent call to action and a very consistent, uh, value prop across different, uh, personas, right? This is when the s e r or AE can come in and personalize on top, and this allows you to scale much more efficiently over time.

Speaker 1: (26:40)
Cool. Um, I think one of the next pieces that extends past templates and the outreach specific language is snippets. Um, but other tools have have resources to do this as well, which is to give your team building blocks, uh, that they can compile things really quickly, the amount of time. And I think one of the things that we always like to do, uh, with new audit engagements is take all the sales communication that your team is sending out, um, and dump it into a tool that builds word clouds or services, common phrases. And you can see how often people are just rewriting the exact same things. Uh, and if you give them snippets as, and they can sort of wire together something really, really quickly and select from multiple different options as opposed to having to rewrite it each time, uh, again, you're gonna get back some rep time, but the extent of that is that you can test these, you can ensure that they're on message and on brand.

Speaker 1: (27:28)
One of the things, uh, for multiple sales leaders that I've spoken to and marketing leaders, what what really gives them, uh, fear is when, uh, hey, I have all these reps that are out here having communication with customers. I don't know what they're saying. I don't know if it's on brand and maybe whether it's effective or not is a secondary asset of that, but like, is it something we want to be saying at all? Uh, and, and this allows us to also be able with templates and snippets to control a lot of that as well. Um, and then the last piece is how you can leverage those snippets to also be able to surface content that's really powerful for your team. Um, I've, we've talked to tons of organizations that spend so much time creating case studies and marketing assets and one pagers and nobody ever sees them because the sales reps don't know how to find them.

Speaker 1: (28:14)
They don't know how to share them, they don't know what they're about and they have no idea when and who they should be sending them to. And the more that you're able to use those snippets, uh, insert them into some of your emails and have a snippet that simply says, you know, I've found the other marketers like you, uh, get value out of this case study. Um, as something your team, if you can get them conditioned to looking through those snippets, so like, oh, cool marketing person case study, click send. Um, it also makes it really easy for your organization to update all of those, uh, and minimize some of your, your rep change management, um, as well, uh, as you're going through some of those processes. Cool. Uh, so role of a modern sales manager. Uh, Ken, I can let you take sort of just like a first pass at this overall sort of like your experience managing multiple team leads. Uh, and then we can touch on like what, what different sales managers that we've worked with have seen be effective.

Speaker 2: (29:10)
Awesome. Um, so as you know, you know, I've been in outreach for a long time. I've used it as an SD r and now as an S C R manager. Um, a lot of people think that, um, you know, a sales engagement platform like outreach just for a sales rep, but you would be surprised at like how great it is for a manager, right? So every day in the morning I log in, um, I check my reps KPIs for, you know, last week or so, how many people they have active in sequence, um, their account penetration, their email reply rates, their email optout rates, they're called conversion rates. I can see a ton of different metrics within outreach, right? Um, I've built out smart views for each of my different teams. I can see the kind of messaging they're sending out, right? Uh, are they going after the right personas? Are they using the right plays on these personas, right? And when we do call blitz using outreach, I can actually live and listen to my reps calls and give them real time feedback and I can use that to manage my different teams, uh, in a really scalable way.

Speaker 1: (30:09)
I think something that Ken touched on that we see a lot is I think the old school sales manager. Uh, and it's interesting cause we, we used to speak to this even pre covid, but I think especially with covid now, um, could walk the floor, overhear phone calls, see if people are doing well, maybe have some one-on-ones. Um, and realist one with, with Covid and everyone working from home predominantly, uh, the viability of that strategy is obviously significantly less, but the effectiveness of that strategy is also much more limited. And I think what we see be most effective, and someone like Ken and a lot of the other sales managers and sales leadership folks that we see and work with is we see a lot of people that can manage entirely with dashboards and metrics and really keep things very quantitative. And the qualitative conversations are still extremely important.

Speaker 1: (30:55)
But, uh, what we see be really effective is a, just a dashboard that shows each rep performance together and bars next to each other is not only can you create competition amongst your team, people will self-manage and look at, oh wow, the other three people are way ahead of me on dials and we might want to go and get more activity on this board. Uh, and you can reduce the need for someone to be going and telling people, Hey, your numbers are really low because they're social, they're present, and they're up and in front of people. Um, and we've seen people have a lot of success doing that with TVs that are on a sales floor. Even something as simple as having, hey, this is a dashboard that you should have open, whether it's an outreach dashboard, a Salesforce dashboard that services that information and data and really leveraging all of that data to help manage teams more effectively. And really a modern sales manager and someone like Ken is gonna be a lot more technical than I would say the majority of folks who, uh, may share a title with Ken in other organizations. And that's more and more going to be the norm, uh, because being able to use these tools is paramount to the success of anyone that's in this role.

Speaker 1: (32:02)
Cool. Caitlin, I'll kick it to you cause I know that we have a couple questions in here that we want to answer.

Speaker 3: (32:10)
Yes. The first question that came in is what metrics are key to track to improve your pipeline?

Speaker 2: (32:18)
Awesome. I can take this one on. Um, I think the number one most important metric, uh, is kind of a volume based metric. Its own prospects added sequence daily, right? So right now I have a team of 30 s SCRs, um, you know, their KPIs, key performs indicators are 20 people in sequence a day. But if, if you do the basic math, um, if these 30 SDRs can add an extra three people per sequence per day, right? It's a very light lift for each sdr. But over a team of 30, that's almost a hundred net new people added to sequence daily over the course of 20 business days, you know, the length of September, that's, um, a ton of new prospects added to sequence, right? Um, and then you get replies from those prospects. Um, let's say you get a thousand replies, you convert a thousand replies, um, 300 meetings and of 300 meetings, 250 become sales accepted leads. If we have an, uh, a c v of $10,000, that's an extra 2.5 million in pipeline just from adding an extra three people to sequence. So now more than ever, like volume is extremely, uh, crucial to increasing pipeline.

Speaker 3: (33:30)
Nice.

Speaker 1: (33:32)
I think one thing to tack onto that is I, I actually, we also love that metric. Uh, I have no idea that that was something that you guys did as well, to be honest with you. But I think we really like that. I think it even matters more because, uh, and before you have the ability of something like an outreach or another sales engagement platform, you are really just promoting activity. But once you're able to automate that downstream activity, um, you're one, your activity numbers should blow up so much that like even managing your team to your old numbers will just seem ridiculous. But more importantly, really identifying how many records are you prospecting into and sequencing and adding into this process becomes the most important aspect of it. And I think that it's also the one that's the easiest to control and also most representative of effort level, which I think is great.

Speaker 3: (34:15)
Great. Um, another one that just came in, you mentioned automating, adding to sequences based on lead action. Can you share some more about that process? If you need me to repeat it, I can,

Speaker 1: (34:29)
I can take the first piece of that for sure. So something we see happen, uh, a lot is leveraging. So if it's in, if it's in something like an outreach specifically, um, we can read different Salesforce fields. So, uh, if a record comes in and it's in an MQL status, we can use marketing automation roles to determine what's the persona, what's the profile. Again, we can get even more sophisticated and use some of those data enrichment tools to say, you know, title contains marketing, title level is director, what's our content that best speaks to that audience? And then using triggers with something like an outreach to then pull that record up into the right sequence that's geared towards that particular audience. And so what the lightest wait way to do that is in something like an outreach, there's a great triggers tool. You can add it and say, whenever a new lead's created, move it into this sequence.

Speaker 1: (35:17)
And the first task in that sequence could be right highly personalized email, uh, which is something that Ken and his team do. We, we've seen people get really sophisticated with it, um, with higher volumes of leads where you can leverage sort of a new lead can come in, we can use the marketing automation system to figure out, you know, what content were they interested in and what persona do we think that content is aligned to. We can use enrichment tools like ZoomInfo DiscoverOrg to add data onto that record and then use something like an outreach to pull that into a sequence that's dedicated to that particular audience. Um, so ways that you can slide that in both directions. Uh, and then Ken, I can let you add anything onto that as well.

Speaker 2: (35:55)
Yeah. And so we use marking automation, uh, we score our leads and once they pass a certain threshold, they're automatically pushed to the SDRs, right? And the first step obviously, you know, write a custom sequence based off their, um, you know, engagement in the past.

Speaker 3: (36:09)
Cool. Um, the next question we have is how should teams handle blended budgets and goals between marketing and sales?

Speaker 1: (36:20)
Cool. Um, I can speak to that a little bit. I think, um, the, the ROI piece is really the one that anything that ends up mattering most, something that we really like to do is leverage, um, Salesforce campaigns. Uh, if you're not on Salesforce, they're different CRMs have different tools to be able to do this, but in Salesforce you're really like the campaign object. And what we like to do is really assign what are the different activities we're engaging in, um, what was our budget and spend for each one. Uh, and then using rules to enroll those records into campaigns. And then with some of the opportunity attribution inside of Salesforce, we can then actually like directly report on, you know, we went to this conference, we spent this much money promoting the conference on social, uh, we sent this email to this many people and we here was our, you know, budgeted flights and travel for not so much anymore cuz they're all virtual, but, uh, here are all of our costs for that conference that's coming up.

Speaker 1: (37:12)
Adding all of those onto a campaign and then looking at the r o ROI that then stems off of it. But I think that the, the most important thing, um, when looking at this is to really make sure that you're collaborating with your marketing team. Uh, you're collaborating with your sales team and you're designing a strategy and a plan together. Um, what we see happen a lot is marketing says, Hey, we have a, you know, thousand MQL number for the quarter, so we're gonna go get that. And sales says, you know, we have this revenue number so we're gonna go get that. And no one ends up talking to each other to say, how can we be making spends and investments and strategies together to make this happen? Um, and I think bringing everyone to the table to really design what that approach is, uh, is going to yield the best results.

Speaker 3: (37:58)
Um, another one that came in during our chat. Um, if sales managers aren't needed to drive metrics, what should they be responsible for?

Speaker 2: (38:07)
I can take that one on. Um, if they aren't responsible for driving metrics, I think the, like the number one thing like all sales managers should be responsible for is like coaching, right? Leveling up rep skills. Um, I think we taught a little bit earlier on like some key metrics, like one of them being volume, right? Efficiency is also another like really key metric. Um, my s SCR team on average makes about a hundred cold calls a day and of a hundred cold calls they speak to only seven people. That's seven conversations a day, right? Um, and the typical s c R only books one meeting out of seven, right? With some hands-on coaching, with some hands-on role playing really, um, leveling up their skill and cold calls. If I can drive that number from one to two across a team of 30, I can have a tremendous impact on pipeline.

Speaker 1: (38:57)
Thanks. I have nothing to add, . That was awesome.

Speaker 3: (39:02)
Um, and it looks like the last question we have, um, for now, unless people ask more questions, are, um, how often should your sales engagement process use and strategies be reevaluated?

Speaker 2: (39:16)
You know, I can take on, uh, a little piece of that. Um, uh, I can only speak for us here in outreach, but um, we have a content specialist who's always running experiments in the background. There's no like formal reevaluation of sequencing or templates, but it's a continuous like process. We're always tinkering and ab testing different templates and sequences and uh, continuously updating and refining our process. Uh, Connor do you wanna add something else onto that? I

Speaker 1: (39:41)
Think the thing that I would add to that, we, we do that as well for customers, uh, modeled after a little bit of what you guys do admittedly. Um, which is how can we go and look at the data that something like an outreach creates, um, and really evaluate what's the performance on each template that each sequence? What are our open rates, what are our click rates? What is the performance of that overall sequence in getting to its terminal endpoint? Which it could be a discovery call, it could be a re-engagement conversation and really understanding and evaluating, uh, how effective we're being and then constantly deploying and updating some of that messaging. Um, something that we see happen a lot is people get something like an outreach, they get really excited about it, they create a bunch of content, they roll it out into their organization and then everyone uses those sequences and those templates and those cadences for 12 months until someone eventually finds out the sales reps don't use those ones anymore cuz they no longer speak to the value prop of the product.

Speaker 1: (40:34)
And our ICP may have shifted a little bit and as we've gone up market, um, and so what we really like to do with customers is we do a lot of ongoing management for that. Um, if you are large enough and you have enough of a a scale in your sales team, having that be somebody's role to go and look at your messaging and the performance of that is I think critically important. Um, and we work with lots of folks who either don't have that in-house sales ops headcount or are looking for sort of more, more of a managed solution. And I think to Ken's point, um, outreach has I, I don't know how many, how many SDS do you guys have overall at Ken?

Speaker 2: (41:06)
Uh, right around 50.

Speaker 1: (41:07)
Cool. So Outreach is a huge outbound organization. They have 50 sales reps. Uh, they're investing in this really heavily. Um, obviously your, your multiples on return for smaller teams won't be as impactful, but percentage wise they'll be exactly the same. Um, and so I think to Ken's point, that's something that's super, super important to continuously optimize and improve.

Speaker 2: (41:26)
Awesome.

Speaker 3: (41:28)
Okay. Great. Last call for any burning questions that might be sitting in your brain

Speaker 1: (41:36)
Type now or never Again,

Speaker 3: (41:38)
, not really. Cause here's some contact information ,

Speaker 1: (41:43)
Feel free to shoot me a note if you have questions about anything. I'm more than happy to chat sales strategy, uh, talk through these other tools. Um, if you're not an outreach customer and you're curious about outreach, I am more than certain that Ken will be able to hook you up with somebody who's happy to talk to you about it as well.

Speaker 3: (42:01)
Cool. All right. With that, thank you everybody for joining. Um, we really appreciate you spending some time with us today. Um, and with that hopefully we'll see you on our next webinar.

Speaker 1: (42:12)
Awesome. Thanks so much everybody, I appreciate it. Uh, and thanks for this Ken.