017: Helping Buyers Access Valuable Marketing Content via Personalized Outbound with Blake Johnston
Outcome Studio Podcast - Marketing & B2B Technology Talk
Release Date: 02/15/2019
Outcome Studio Podcast - Marketing & B2B Technology Talk
Eric Eicher and Bryan Kryder are co-founders of RightHand, a marketing agency based in Indianapolis. I wanted them to share their process for actively aligning stakeholders, such as executives, marketing teams, and sales leaders, to achieve common language and goals before doing marketing execution. This saves teams time and gets better engagement from buyers. They learned this framework after years of making videos and campaigns that didn't "work" because strategy, messaging, and goals were misaligned.
info_outline 030: Enabling IT Channel Partner Success and Revenue with Good Marketing Execution with Brent PatrickOutcome Studio Podcast - Marketing & B2B Technology Talk
Brent Patrick is Senior Marketing Manager at Scale Computing. He's responsible for Channel Marketing and Marketing Ops. This includes sales handoff and sourcing leads for the Account Development reps. In Episode 030, we discuss how agile marketing in 2020 has allowed their partners to increase revenue during a tough economic climate. Brent's holds certs in Pardot and the SiriusDecisions B2B Marketing. Certs help him think outside the IT industry, enabling good marketing execution with speed and confidence.
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Zach Broome is a Channel Partner at Procurri. He's produced over 30 videos on his "Procurri Zach" YouTube channel. Zach has been in channel sales focused on the IT data center for almost six years. For the past two years he's found that making video content as a salesperson keeps his relationships strong during long deal cycles. If you work in sales or marketing at a VAR, MSP, Solution Provider you'll enjoy this episode. Zach's role at Procurri helps VARs sell more net-new infrastructure deals.
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info_outline 023: How IT Solution Providers Use Marketing Content to Speed Up Sales CyclesOutcome Studio Podcast - Marketing & B2B Technology Talk
Why is it important for IT solution providers and manufacturers to invest in content, even if it's a core piece of content once a quarter? In the world of IT, solution providers have access to partner portals with great content, however...
info_outline 022: 4 Part Formula for the IT Channel to Drive Better Buyer Attendance - Tips for List Building, Email, Phone, and SocialOutcome Studio Podcast - Marketing & B2B Technology Talk
There are 4 main parts to a successful outbound campaign: List Optimization, Email, Phone, and Social Media. This episode 022 with Blake Johnston, CEO at OutboundView, is less focused on messaging and more focused on reducing friction within the tools to help us have conversations. There is a category of technology called "Sales Acceleration" tools that the IT Channel needs to understand. They can transform ability to connect with buyers to drive attendance to events, webinars, and other content.
info_outlineShow highlights:
- 05:30 - Blake's background, talking about how he did eCommerce around college and mastered it. Then took sales role and realized that he liked marketing just as much as sales. He loved the new customer part. He also describes why enterprise outside sales is a tough role when it comes to closing deals.
- 11:00 - B2B vs B2C, and why B2C marketing is harder. We take a quick sidebar into eCommerce affiliate marketing and why it's a good side project for any B2B marketer. We also talk about how B2C eCommerce is closer to Inside Sales because of the quicker time to close, but with eCommerce you can't hide if your efforts are working or not. The ad sped directly correlates to payments on the website or not.
- 14:50 - We discuss Inbound, outbound, and paid. What are the differences? Inbound - how do you know what to be writing about, what will be interesting to your buyers, and what will get traffic. Creating the content isn't enough because you have to get the traffic SEO. Inbound marketers also need to understand how to execute on conversion and high level strategies that get results. Typically, bringing this in-house requires writers and designers. Outbound - setting up Inside Sales, how do we set up cadence tools, and how do we get to our buyers, plus how to be leveraging marketing automation. Paid - this are is difficult to just dip your toe in because it's complex. Outbound View, Blake's company, does all three of these because even with a good engine going, companies need to diversify because a channel can quit working at any time. Paid efforts enhances inbound and outbound.
- 19:00 - Hiring internal marketing resources is hard, and every single marketing agency service is easily $1,000-2,000. Smaller business owners either have to figure it out on their own, or find the local "cheap guy" in the city to get some tactical results at a lower cost than the big agency.
- 21:00 - ADRs and SDRs - are they becoming a marketing function versus just appointment setters in 2019? Blake is seeing more ADRs rolling up to marketing, but really the ADRs and Inside teams simply need to belong in the group with the best nurturing and oversight. So whichever function can provide that gets the SDRs, which is organization-specific. Typically, there is no compensation plan for Inside Sales people to want to push a white paper, event, webinar, etc. The proposed fix: doing an ADR or Inside Sales rotation where Inside Sales is dedicated to marketing content promotion for entire month in a quarter. Personalized emails work better than email blasts.
- 27:40 - It's not groundbreaking that Inside Sales should help marketing promote content, but if there's not structure to do this it becomes everyone's part time job which isn't effective and not thoughtful. Instead, Blake argues that there needs to be a human caller dedicated to providing buyer value. They're not asking for meetings out of nowhere. They're doing soft call to action, not hard. This method is a good introduction to your company to entire strangers (individuals or departments in existing accounts).
- 29:30 - Account Based Marketing with personalized content promotion, use for new logos or account expansion. Soft to use the call to action as events or webinars.
- 33:00 - How do sales and marketing get aligned for ABM? It can get complex quickly. It requires a legitimate marketing plan for an account, but that won't happen without executive sponsorship.
- 34:00 - LinkedIn ads for targeted accounts. $10 per click is expensive, but it depends on what buyer level you're shooting for. You can pretty easily get to very specific people on LinkedIn. Consider Facebook and Instagram targeting for cheaper if you have a list to upload.
- 37:00 - We discuss free LinkedIn organic methods, and doing social sales cadences.
- 40:00 - Executives are getting more involved in sharing knowledge with the community (especially on Social and LinkedIn) because they have something unique to say versus their ADRs who are new and don't have an opinion yet. Blake says he does podcast interviews or guest blogging because it leads to sales and pipeline and ROI on his time invested.
- 43:00 - Closing remarks from Blake at Outbound View.