017: Helping Buyers Access Valuable Marketing Content with a Personalized Outbound Approach with Blake Johnston

February 15, 2019
Podcast

Overview:


As marketers, we create the events, schedule the keynote speakers, write the white paper, or build a super helpful webinar that surely every buyer wants to attend.

As sales people, we love how marketing is helping us with events and content, but we don’t have time to push that dang Meetup or the new infographic.

In this episode 017, Blake Johnston joins us as the CEO at OutboundView, which is a company focused on B2B Appointment Setting and Inside Sales Consulting.

Blake and I talk about how to address this problem and it starts from executive sponsorship. Why is it important? Because most new buyers don’t want that hard sales meeting as a first touch with your business. Use outbound and inside sales teams to have a softer entry point into your world.

Listen to the podcast on iTunes here.

Show 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.

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