00:00 Thanks for watching!

00:07 Okay, so hi, Michael. Great to have you here again today. Michael Hanson from Grow Genie. Yeah, Michael, I wanted to have you on because we're doing this video series around different tips that we can give sales teams to start implementing immediately. I think at the moment, generally anyway, across the board, it's always good for advice, but I think things that people can really take away and start implementing from today onwards is really helpful, especially things that don't.

00:33 need an awful lot of resource, maybe it's some suggestions on which tools they should use, et cetera, et cetera. But first and foremost, thanks so much for coming on, Michael. Likewise, Andy, always a pleasure to be on. Great. So in terms of what you're offering to your customer base at the moment, is there anything like any insights that you can give us, a couple of tips that sales teams can take away and go and achieve and do right now, Michael? Yeah, for sure. And I think some of these tips may seem quite obvious to very good sales people, but based on some of the training and

01:03 and coaching that I give salespeople, I've noticed these are very common things that people aren't doing, which is why I wanted to prescribe these particular advice. So the first one is, I always recommend to be a sales doctor. You may ask, what do I mean by sales doctor? It's like when you go into a doctor, they'll always diagnose before they prescribe you anything. So they'll ask you, what's wrong with you? What are your symptoms, et cetera.

01:28 And one of the big mistakes I see salespeople making is that they're not doing that. They're always talking about the prescription before the diagnosis. So it's all about asking questions to understand what are the pain points of your potential prospect or customer. And then after that, talking about your solution, because you won't actually know about how your solution fixes their pains, obviously, until you understand the pain. So that's one.

01:53 The second one is related to that. So you may be asking, how do I understand the pains? How do I uncover those pains? What kind of questions can I ask? So I always recommend to ask open-ended questions that can uncover those pains. What can be quite a good thing to do is look at your ideal customer profile, what are the top five challenges they may have, and then try to write questions around those challenges. So I thought I'd give an example just based on the fact that I know Leadfeeder.

02:22 So in your field, one of the pains may be that companies spend a lot of time researching who are the companies who are in the market for them. So something you could ask is, out of interest, how much time does your marketing or sales team spend on researching their ideal accounts versus actually reaching out to them? And that's a good question because they could say, 40% of the time is spent on admin and only 60% of the time is spent on selling.

02:51 And you obviously want 100% of the time spent on selling, right? So a third one is something Andy and I discussed recently was about outbound calling. So we were actually talking about it in the sense of prospecting. But the biggest area of opportunity I've actually seen with salespeople is at the closing parts of your account executive salesperson who's actually taking it through to the end.

03:18 is using outbound calling once you've actually had a demo or a consultation if you're a service. Because the big mistake I see with salespeople is they just send a few follow-up emails. And the first email will be send the proposal. Second email, did you see the proposal? Third email is just the chase. Where actually, if you're using kind of an omnichannel approach, the same as like an SDR does as an account executive, that's very useful because you can call them, have a more interactive conversation.

03:46 really see what their objections are. So that's why I recommend if you're like an account executive, people you've already got in the pipeline, you know, actually pick up the phone and call them as well. And then just in terms of calling, so this is the fourth one, if you're either yet an SDR account executive, wherever you are in the sales process, one of the most difficult things nowadays with calling is getting someone to pick up the phone, because we're becoming more and more digital, it becomes harder and harder to actually get someone to connect, to pick up their phone.

04:15 So one of the ways I recommend to get around this, especially if you're targeting someone quite senior in the company, like a VP, C-level, et cetera, is to call them early in the morning, so around eight o'clock. And that means they should be awake, maybe they're having breakfast, but they're not in the nitty gritty of their day where they've got a million people actually trying to contact them. And then same, contact them maybe at like 5.30, 6 p.m. And that's when their day's finished, they're kind of winding down, they're a little bit more relaxed.

04:44 So those are a couple of things that I'd recommend in terms of times to actually pick up the phone and call people. And then the last one, I think Andy will like this as I know he's big on marketing and sales alignment. I have quite a lot of marketing in my background as well is aligned with marketing a lot, like speech and marketing the whole time. I'm saying as Andy is in that I think sales and marketing should be one engine. And then a big thing is

05:11 ask them about the content that's been successful, because you may have seen a lot of stuff online recently. People like Josh Braun talk about deposits. I talk about giving before you take. And it's like what I was saying before about diagnosing. You don't want to, on your first email or first LinkedIn message, just be talking about you. If you can share content that's related to some of those challenges earlier, that's a really good way. And a lot of the way I start sales conversations, I have two or three bits of content that I know that.

05:40 that really resonate. And I'll just send people an offer and they'll reply and say thanks and I'll start a conversation. So if you can speak to your marketing team and say what are the bits of content that are getting lots of clicks in email or videos that are getting lots of views, podcasts that are getting lots of listens, ask them about those and those are great things to then send to your prospects if you're in sales. So that would be my last tip. Yeah, that's great tips, Mike, I think.

06:07 Just on your last point there in sales and marketing alignment, as you said, this is something that I specialize in, but mainly because I've been in a sales background myself before I've also been in SDR, I've been an account manager, I've managed an SDR team. And when I managed the SDR team, I actually brought them under the marketing umbrella. So I was a VP of marketing and marketing and SDR is what reported to me. And I think like the number one thing that I find across a lot of people that I know

06:37 alignment thing isn't a given. It's not just, it doesn't just happen. There needs to be somebody that's orchestrating it. I'd always be the orchestrator of that. I'd always be like the conductor between sales and marketing to make sure that they're speaking to one other. Like even before I joined Leadfeeder, they were of the opinion that they were aligned, but their KPIs weren't aligned. So when I joined, I started pushing more, okay, let's get marketing really focused on the...

07:06 on the revenue side of things and that automatically, like once you get, once you start putting revenue targets towards a marketing team, you're going to have to get the sales and marketing team aligned. They're going to have to do it themselves because anything, anywhere that you're spending the money needs to make sense because if it's not bringing back revenue, then it's going to be seen as a failure. So you need to be making sure that the marketing team are then discussing that with the sales team and saying, Hey, if I bring in leads from this specific place, are they actually comparing to business? Even if you don't have a good way of tracking that.

07:33 the best way to find out is to go and ask the sales team. These conversations maybe hadn't happened before in the past, but that's where you start, in my opinion, is with making sure KPI is aligned and it's normally around revenue. And if you're promising from a marketing org back to the sales org being like, okay, my content can help you bring an extra X amount of pipeline that you're gonna have to go search for anyway yourself, then you're gonna be pretty sure that the marketing and sales team are gonna be pretty well aligned. And it's good from a sales perspective as well to push it.

08:02 You know, like based on what you just mentioned there, having content which you can push out to prospects knowing that it resonates rather than just going straight in with an offer or something. It says people know that works. And what you need to do as a salesperson is then go put pressure on the marketing team. If they don't have that content there, start putting pressure on them to get them to create that content. If they're not creating that content for you, create something yourself and push it across to the marketing team.

08:27 And I guarantee you, there's nothing worse to getting some of the piece of content that's been written by a salesperson in your marketing because you're like, this is supposed to be my job and sales shouldn't be doing it. Yeah, right. No, basically. Yeah, one of the things I didn't mention actually is related to one of the points. I was talking about the follow-up once you've had a meeting to help convert a lead to close one. And that's another point where you can use that content. I was kind of talking about it from a prospecting perspective from an SDR first or second touch using content.

08:55 I found that a lot of deals that I've closed is I sent a proposal, I've got next steps in the diary, they may not turn up for that call. I'm like, you know, what's going wrong? I can't get a hold of them. And then I'll share like a piece of content on LinkedIn, no CTA, let's go in another call, have you seen the proposal? And I know it's super relevant to them. And actually at that point, not have you seen the proposal? They'll say, oh, I love that piece of content, let's get on that call. So that's another good way even like account executives, they can be using content to like nurture leads as well.

09:24 It's an easier foot in the door and it's not such a hard sell. You know, like recently enough, we had a big deal close and it closed because of an effort that we've done from actually from the marketing side and a campaign marketing campaign, which we we had. We've been speaking with a specific company, an enterprise, an enterprise company, actually the biggest deal that we've closed in the company's history, which I believe. And it had gone quiet for about two months.

09:53 So our contact person there had gone a bit quiet. And then what had happened is we did an AVM campaign which focused on a different person within the organization that was already aware of us, that we'd already been speaking with, but their user role was a little bit different. That person downloaded an ebook, and then the salesperson then just followed up with an additional piece of content, saying, if you enjoyed the ebook, here's some more information or another blog post around that specific topic. Have a read, if there's anything more that you need, let me know. And like...

10:22 a day later, hey, yeah, we're interested in pushing forward. We really need the solution, by the way. You know, like it was a very soft touch, but that soft touch then turned into our biggest deal ever. So, you know, so it, yeah, it goes to show that the power of content and the power of not being too salesy. Okay, Michael, look, thank you. That's all the time we have for today, but really big thank you. And thank you for putting those couple of tips out to people. I really enjoyed it. And I really look forward to speaking with you again, yeah.

10:51 Likewise, Andy Hope will be chatting soon and anyone who's listening, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Cheers, Michael. Thanks, Andy.