022: 4 Part Formula for the IT Channel to Drive Better Buyer Attendance – Tips for List Building, Email, Phone, and Social

July 1, 2019
Podcast


Overview:


There are 4 main parts to a successful outbound campaign: List Optimization, Email, Phone, and Social Media.

On episode 022, joining us is Blake Johnston, CEO at OutboundView, which is a company focused on B2B Appointment Setting and Inside Sales Consulting.

We discuss reducing friction within the tools and channels that help us have conversations. There is a genre of technology called “Sales Acceleration Technology” 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 designed to educate on a solution.


Listen to the full episode on iTunes here.

If messaging is good and the event or marketing content is attractive, this set of tools for list building, phone, email, and social media can be effective for driving better attendance.

Show highlights:


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.


What did we learn?


IT channel marketing activities can flop: field events, webinars, content, or campaigns that get no ROI on co-marketing funds.

Why? Sometimes, partner sales teams lack bandwidth to properly promote and follow-up. Marketing can be spread too thin or lack the skills. As well, Sales Development Reps across the board get measured on meetings, not driving event attendance.

To learn how you could outsource driving event attendance and building a “highly engaged” buyer list with Blake and I, fill out the form here to have a conversation.


Find Blake online: