Selling during a Crisis in 2020

How to adapt in a deflated market

How to Drive Top of Funnel Opportunity Pipeline 2020 Webinar

In this webinar, Tony J. Hughes, the #1 influencer for professional selling in Asia-Pacific, runs through how to adapt in a deflated market.

The webinar recording can be accessed below: 

 

Video Transcribed:

We might kick things off for the webinar, this morning. Thank you everybody for joining. This is going to be a webinar on building top of funnel, particularly during, during a crisis, such as the one that we’re being faced with, at the moment, just going to run through some housekeeping before we kick things off.

 

If everyone can make sure that they are on mute and that they’re wearing a headphone, or a pair of headphones. I know that everybody, may be working from home today. So that’s just to keep some peace with our loved ones. We will be recording this session. So we’ll be getting sent out after, the session for everybody who has registered.

 

With that, I will, Introduce Tony Hughes. Tony is an international keynote speaker where we’re super pumped to have him on this webinar as bestselling author, leading professional selling educator award winning blogger. The list goes on. He’s an experienced CEO and company director with 35 years experience something that I think is interesting for this webinars within that 35 years of experience, Tony has experienced downturns he’s experienced the early nineties, recession has experienced, 911, the GFC,  and all of these, I think things that we’re interested in, in understanding more about in terms of how to react to this, to this market. So Tony, I’m just going to unmute you and welcome you to the webinar.

 

Hi, thanks, Tom. I, really appreciate the welcome and thanks for the intro. Hi everybody. I’m really excited about the conversation we’ll have today. Just to declare a couple of things up front, I’m on the advisory board of Triggr. I’m a huge fan of the company. So we’re going to be talking today predominantly on how you can use technology to an essence become kind of superhuman in the way that you sell. This webinar is a follow-up to one that I did about a month ago with sales IQ. It’s a business I’ve co-founded to sales like IQ is the sponsor of this webinar today. We’d really like to thank them. This was the webinar that we did, about five weeks ago. It had, thousands of people registered. We did it really in the peak, when there was a lot of emotion around what was going on with COVID-19. Obviously, the world is moving on. You may be watching the recording of this video, at a much later time and the reality is, is all the things that were true, when we weren’t in tough times, still true.

 

But some things are brought into much sharper focus for us. So we’re going to talk about that. In the last webinar that you can see here. And this is really a follow up webinar to it. I really talked about mindset and then how you can create the right conversation narrative, to be able to break through and help clients.

 

What we’re going to be focusing on today, is more mindset. I’ll summarize some of the things about narrative because without the right conversations, it’s a huge struggle to be able to create engagement with anybody to then eventually make a sale. So, today’s going to be about mindset or summarize some of the things about narrative, but then we’ll jump into how you can use technology and we’ll give you some real examples.

 

Now, this is a really interesting piece of data. It’s from Bombora. You can see the link in the bottom right hand side there. What Tom will do in the follow-up email that will go to everybody is we’ll include the link to Bombora. So you can always see the latest data. But in essence, what they showed if you have a look at the lift axis, the vertical axis, it shows purchasing intent. So what you can see is the black line is 2019 and the red line is now in 2020. And you can say that there was a huge falling away. Of people researching potential vendors or suppliers and what that translates to is less inbound.

 

So it’s really important that with the less amount of inbound that we’re experiencing, that we follow up really quickly, there’s an absolute correlation between the speed of response and the probability of making the sale. So we respond quickly. But also we create the right kind of engagement. And I’ll actually talk about that.

 

You can say that that gap is closing as things returned to normal. But make no mistake. We’re absolutely in a recession right now. And many of you may be feeling like this. You may feel that, it’s pretty insensitive. To be calling people and driving bound, to try and create a sales opportunity pipeline.

 

But the reality is, now is the time to actually step up, at the height of Corona, when people would first started working from home, they were answering their mobile phones, their cell phones, like never before their office numbers were forwarding.  So, we needed to get back on the phone.

 

People are still answering the phone, but. We need to use all of the channels of communication in the way that we drive outreach. It’s really important. So the key thing here is that, it’s really adversity that builds character. I’ve always believed in mind, Todd business life, that if you want to see what the person’s really like, go and observe them in a really difficult time.

 

When companies have to lay people off, you’ll see what their real values are like in the way that they do that. If a boss is under a massive amount of pressure and trying to hit the number, you know, the way that they work with their people, if they, you know, pull out the flame thrower in one hand and their forecast and the other, and just drive people at an insane levels that actually damage the prospects of closing business, you know, you see what the person’s really like, because the reality is we can only manage the input activities.

 

That feed into objectives that then create results. That’s really how you drive revenue. So the truth is what are we going to do to not just save our own careers and the people around us that we work with because the success of salespeople is what drives the economy. And it’s also what drives the success within an individual business. But the reality is our success with customers is what helps those organizations thrive because in essence, the job of any salesperson is to help the client see, a better future state,  that there’s ways that they could be improving their business. And we’ll talk about what those drivers are in a moment, but in essence, selling is a noble profession, you know, it’s where you, you help other people.

 

And we’ll talk about that. So, It’s time to step up. Intent is everything. And selling has always been about making a positive difference in the lives of customers. And it is the fuel for success. So, what we don’t want to do is we do not want to convey to customers that we’re all about us and our product or solution.

 

And that were about us and us making a sale. It needs to be all about them. It’s vitally important intent is everything. So, as you think about dialing it up, really, really keep that in mind. So, in the beginning of COVID-19 what I saw in the marketplace and I work with organizations all over the world and some of the biggest brains in the marketplace,  are my clients, global brands.

In the beginning, what sellers did. And that was the right thing to do is they would just have a huge level of empathy, not just for their own people, the leaders in organizations with their salespeople, but also the salespeople and account managers, those customer success, people with their clients and their prospects.

 

So, they’d call them and say, Hey, I just wanted to check that you’re okay. You know, are you okay? Is your team okay? Is there anything that we can do to help? And that was exactly the right thing to do to recognize that being socially distanced doesn’t mean being disconnected and to have genuine empathy without any hidden agenda.

 

It’s not about trying to find an angle to progress the sale or create an opportunity. It was just being a good human being and I agreed with it and empathy is still important, but the world has moved on and people very quickly went from feeling, bewildered, paralyzed, distressed working from home. They went from that to thinking, do you know what? I’ve got to find a way to make this work. And if my company is going to be experiencing tough times, they’re going to be reassessing all of the projects and initiatives going on inside the business. I need to make sure that I’m seen as someone who’s making a positive difference, that the things I’m doing are important.

 

And I need to find a way to step it up. So, I don’t just protect my own career, but also for the people who work for me within my company, I want my project or my team to be okay. And that was really, you know, have people started to think,  it’s becoming more so now, and I’ll talk in a moment about how the boardroom and the C-suite really view things, but for those mid-level managers, they’re thinking, how do I make time maintain my relevance in my organization? And as a salesperson, you can absolutely help them do that. I’ve had so many conversations, so many conversations with salespeople who have shared stories with me in the last few weeks about how they’d helped their clients double down on the strength of the business.

 

For what they were doing together to make sure that their client continues to have their job and that their team is okay. So, with everything going on, there’s a lot of negativity, but let me talk about something that’s really positive. Apathy is absolutely dead.  and you might think really, you know, I’m running out and to prospects and they’re saying, Hey look, you know, any discretionary spending has been frozen right now, projects are being reassessed.

 

We’re not looking at buying anything. You call me back in six months, nine months, 12 months. And you might think that that’s apathy. It’s not apathy at all. The thing that’s going on in boardrooms is they’re very focused, on how they can reduce costs and improve cash flow. Any organization in a crisis is laser focused on those two things.

 

How do I reduce cost and improve cashflow and driving revenue absolutely contributes to improving cash flow. The other thing that’s happening in boardrooms and in the C-suite. These organizations are thinking, do you know what? Never let a good crisis go to waste. The truth is we’re experiencing tough times.We need to use what’s going on right now as a way of re-engineering the business of making ourselves more efficient. As an organization, we need to find ways to leverage technology and automation to, at the same time, drive down costs as well as improve staff and customer experience. We just need to become a leaner, more effective organization.

 

And that’s what’s happening, in the boardroom, even though it’s a virtual boardroom, maybe, as we’re recording this. The thing is this, the strength of the business case is what will carry your sale now. It’s always been important to have commercial acumen, but I think it’s the new, the new table stakes for all salespeople later today in this webinar, I’m going to talk about the importance of TQ technical quotient, because I think that’s the newest, essential skill that all sellers need to have.

 

For now let’s talk about commercial acumen.  You need to be able to identify, the financial impact. How does what you’re doing impact their organization in terms of dollars percentages or key result metrics by which they measure their organization. It’s really essential. Work with the people, the mid-levels in your prospect or customer organizations and help them make sure they carry a strong business case up the line help your customers sell internally is, is, is really a key thing.

 

So as you drive sales pipeline today and into the future, there’s a few expectations of clients. That we really need to bear in mind. And the first is that clients expect us to truly know them and they expect us to know them at four levels. They expect us to know not our industry, you know, that’s obvious they expect us to know their industry.

 

So, know their industry. They company or organization, and as part of that, the customers or the markets they serve. And then the fourth thing is them in their role. So, understand the buyer persona, and that’s why it’s never been more important that you have clarity about your ideal customer profile. And then the buyer personas that you’re working with so that you have a baseline understanding or knowledge about the people that you’re targeting.

 

And then based on that, they expect you to then tailor the conversation and content and to anticipate what would be important to them. And in essence, you know, they’re thinking, look, I’m not interested in you. What do you think you can do for me? And why should I care? The mistake that a lot of sellers make is they lead with why they think they’re uniquely different instead of leading with why the customer or potential customer should care about a conversation in the first place.

 

How does this improve their results for them in their role? It’s really important. So, you know, rather than focusing on why we’re uniquely different, think about why should they consider and why should they consider changing? And when you think about qualifying a prospect or a deal, just bear in mind that, you know, a prospect of potential buyers.

 

Once the field, like they’re getting the Spanish inquisition, none of them want to feel like they’re getting a pitch from a sales person. None of them want to feel like they’re being qualified by somebody. So, we need to blend discovery and qualification together. And the best way to do that in your own mind is to really adopt the mindset of what you’re just trying to do is to establish the strength of the business case for working together. And you say, Hey, Mary, look, I’m not even sure whether it would make sense to do something together or whether we’re the, we’re the right organization for you. I’m just trying to understand, you know, what your business case would look like internally, and whether we’re best fit for you.

 

So that’s really the intent that you’re seeking to convey. It’s really important. The other thing I just want to share with you as I opened up this webinar, by talking about the fact that in really tough times, inbound can drop away. That obviously means it’s so much more important that we become proactive and how we’re driving outbound.

 

You’ll see some ways of doing that today. We’ll show you live, but with inbound, there’s three questions that you really need to become masterfully good at asking in a very natural way.  So, when a lead comes to you, the buyer is normally in their mode of asking us a whole bunch of questions and they also want to know at price.

 

And we need to be cooperative. Doesn’t appear to be uncooperative say, Hey look, Mary. Absolutely. Provide all of that information. Here’s the first question. But do you mind if I ask what’s happened inside the business, that’s caused you to want to look at this right. And the thing I believe, if you look at all of the qualification frameworks out there in the world, you know, the most popular one is budget, authority, need and timeline there’s medic and there’s lots of these other qualification frameworks. I think the degree of engagement that you get with somebody. Is what determines the probability of winning more so than those qualification frameworks. So, what you’re looking for is engagement the degree to which they share information with you and access to other key people because they need to achieve consensus in their organization, as well as a strong business case, the degree to which they do that dance with you is the degree to which you’re likely to get a good qualified prospect and then eventually a new successful client.

 

So, first question what’s happened inside your organization that’s caused you to be looking at this, not to want to buy from us, but just to be looking at this next thing is, Hey, look, whether you did something with us or anybody else. What improved results would you expect to get for the organization and also for you and your role? And what you’re trying to get to now is what’s the strength of the business case behind this, because we live in a market today where you can’t afford to be selling an essence of vitamins tablet, you’d need to be selling a headache tablet. We need to be solving serious pain for organizations or help them realize very significant opportunities. You know, rather than being perceived as something that’s just nice to have that they can put off.

 

Then the last question, as you gain engagement, you wouldn’t open with this one, but as you start to really gain engagement, the last thing is, Hey, I’m hooked you mind. If I ask, where do you see the risks of getting this done of implementing it successfully of getting your team actually using this, of getting the result with your customers that you’re planning.

 

And the, what all of the researchers discovered is that the number one thing that influences the buyer’s decision when they get to that short list is it’s the degree to which they believe that you truly understand them and that you have positive intent in helping them realize the results from implementing whatever, whatever it is that you sell, rather than just you making a sale is the greater, which I think you truly understand them, then you can help them go and get the outcome that will cause them to buy because everyone on the shortlist in their mind can basically do the job for them.

 

So, there are three questions that will really help you as you respond to inbound. In the last webinar I gave this example, this is one of my global clients they’ve given me permission to share this, but a flight centre travel group, I’ve got quite a number of B2B brands. A lot of you may know them for their retail brand.

 

And you know, they’re actually a wonderful business. They great people that got really positive culture and, you know, they’re operating in an extremely tough market. I can’t imagine anybody that’s watching this today to have a business that’s going through a tougher time than them. In working with their leadership team, we developed a narrative that gave them incredible engagement with their clients. So, they anticipated the, the pushback or the objection of when they call up their existing clients. Those clients going to say, Hey look, none of my people are traveling or booking hotel rooms. There’s no point talking, you know, come back and see us when the airlines are back in the air.

 

So, they anticipated that and they had a wonderful point of view, and reason to engage. And it was basically this, Hey, with everything going on. Now is the perfect time to reassess your travel policy and the way that you’re managing travel as a process, because you’ve got no change management issues, you’ve got the bandwidth within your team right now and when your people come back to traveling again and visiting clients and moving around the country and internationally, they can do it in a way where you’ve driven anywhere from six to 12% of the cost from the process of how you’re managing travel and in a way where you’ve got a far less duty of care risk as an organization and where you’re giving your staff a much better experience, you know, as a traveler within the business, which will help you with employee retention and productivity.

 

When can we find the time and they’ve had incredible engagement. So just think yourself, how do you anticipate pushback or objections? How do you create the right conversation narrative? That gives you engagement with people that you can legitimately help is really, really important. So, let’s move on to talk about the whole issue of TQ technology quotient.

 

It’s actually the subject of a new book that I’m co-authoring with Justin Michael it’s called TQ superhuman sales skills. We just signed the book publishing deal with Harper Collins, in the USA. And it’ll be published probably in June, 2021. So it’s just over a year away. The books is in draft form has had incredible feedback.

 

But strong TQ is essential today. We’ve all known that you always need IQ.  You can’t be successful if you’re not smart. You need good EQ you know, which I think includes, includes work ethic. It’s not just self-awareness and being good with other people, but it’s being aware of what it really takes to be successful in life.

 

But here’s the thing today is all of the technology that, you know, you can see in an office in that, in that image, on the left of your screen, was helping people be successful at work. And it’s incredible how people have found ways using technology. Technology has been incredible as save so many jobs for people it’s enabled them to survive and still collaborate and work and communicate with people.

 

But do you know what? You can leverage technology, not just to survive, but to thrive, to go to the next level in your sales role to be incredibly successful and it’s really the super power that all of us need develop. We need to learn how we can blend a tech stack, a range of technologies together to automate processes for us, and to equip us to be successful.

 

I’m a massive fan of trigger events. A trigger event is something that happens in the marketplace that creates need for a buyer or awareness, of the opportunity for them to change or improve things. And for the seller, if we monitor those, it gives us incredibly strong context for a conversation. So again, if you can use technology to monitor for trigger events, it means you never make another cold call for the rest of your life. If you can use technology, to do pragmatic research really quickly, if you can surface attributes about a person or organization you’re seeking to contact,  it warms up the phone conversation for you. It enables you to, to play back attributes or reference a trigger event that’s gone on.

 

And what happens when you do that, is that you’re showing them that you know them, the best way to build rapport is to, is to earn the right to build some trust with them by first showing that you’ve done your research and that you know them to a degree rather than the fake empathy, that a lot of people adopting a kind of friending strategy in a way that by driving engagement. So, blend a range of technologies together, a tech stack, or work with a company who’s figured out how to do that for you. You’ll see in a moment,  with Tom, he’s going to demonstrate how they’ve mashed up an amazing array of technologies in such a clever way to do that work for you.

 

But it’ll show you the types of things that are possible. And then become masterfully good with tools.   the number of people that I see were ill say to them. Hey, can you just share your screen with me if I’m doing it with them remotely? Hey, just, just jumping into sales navigator, LinkedIn sales navigator for me, just, just show me your saved searches in navigator and how you’re using it to monitor for trigger events. And, what I normally get is just crickets. You know, most people, treat sales navigator like their gym membership, you know, they pay this annual fee or monthly fee, but they never go. So, our, the thing with navigator is it’s amazingly painful tool, but, but people hardly use it.

 

So you can really extend your reach and effectiveness. If you develop a strong TQ. Now, let me just talk about, why I think this is so important, right? So, IQ plus EQ plus TQ can make a superhuman. If you have a look on the left here, this is what machines or technology, does really well. It can, it can manage huge amounts of data and filter it.

 

It does what if analysis with pattern matching and a can make recommendations, if you think about the way that you use, E-bay, or any of those online platforms like Amazon, those recommendation engines have got amazing algorithms in the background, working with big data, doing things that. Would take you months and months to figure out they’re doing in seconds.

 

And the big thing that technology is great at, especially for businesses is task automation. Really, really important to leverage task automation, and the truth for us as sellers. If we don’t embrace the technologies that can augment our own effectiveness and help us achieve more, if we don’t embrace technology, most of us are destined to be replaced by it.

 

We’ve seen in manufacturing and a lot of blue collar roles in society. Jobs just disappear through industrial automation and technology, but for white collar professions, people like, lawyers, accountants,  many of those types of professions and yes, salespeople,  are in danger of being automated out of existence, especially as AI becomes more and more powerful.

 

We’re absolutely in the fourth industrial revolution and machines can monitor for trigger events. You can use technology to monitor the trigger events, which lets you know who it is you should be driving outreach to because the key thing here is you’re then engaging where there’s, where there’s a higher propensity for the person to actually buy.

 

If you’re talking to people that are in the window or there’s really good product market fit for what you do and you can engage with strong context,  you’re a lot more effective as a seller. Now, if you look at the other side, the things that humans are really good at is empathy and creativity.We can build emotional connection. We’re good at helping someone build a business case, identifying risk, managing complexity and politics. You know, we can be creative. We can secure a consensus and support. The bots, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to do that. Maybe they’ll be able to fake empathy a little bit one day, but t hey wouldn’t be able to do those truly human things. So, if you can blend the human things with the power of technology and machines, you can take yourself to a whole new level. That’s just incredibly powerful. I just want to finish on this and it’s, it’s a bit of a checklist.  the thing that staggers me, in sales and, you know, I’ve had 35 years of selling, work with lots of organizations and they spend a lot of money on technology.

 

But the thing that just staggers me is have people just don’t use it well. And if you think about, any traits person or any professional, they need to use the, they need to use the tools well. Well, you know, you, you imagine talking to a pilot who said, Hey, look, you know, I’m a great pilot. I love flying, but I’m just not into doing paperwork.

 

You know, I’m not into filling in log books and things you think, man, I’m not flying with you.  imagine if you went to a doctor, you know, the doctor said to you, look. Would you like me to diagnose you and write out the script? Or do you want me to fill in the patient records? You know, which one do you want me to do?

 

You know, I’d say, are you, for real, you’re a professional. I expect you to do both.  I expect you to do both, right. And yet the number of salespeople who just don’t fill in this CRM, who, or who can’t use their tools is just incredible. So, if you’re wondering, you know, what your TQ is like, you know, have a look at these questions here. I won’t read through all of the questions. You can see them on the screen, but you know, when your boss say that you’re a good user of the CRM. Do you know how to construct a bullion search? Have you, have you got Google alerts running for you?  Do you truly know how to use sales navigator? Have you got safe searches running? Do you know how to use effectively their search interface, which is incredibly powerful. Would you, you know how to build your own email campaign, your increases singly today? Salespeople need to be their own marketers.  you know, we need to be able to drive much. Levels of, of, of effectiveness in using tech.

 

And if you can answer yes to all of these questions, you absolutely need to improve your own TQ. Now, what I’d like to do, is really pass over to Tom. But before I do that, you know, the reality is, with everything that’s been going on, we’re going to look back at this and go, you know? Wow. but one of the things I think that will happen is you’re looking at the bottom right side here.I think there’ll be a time where we look back and we go. You know what, all of this drove a whole lot more technology being used by people. And I’ve now got tech working for me as a seller. I’ve got sales bots working for me, basically, driving automated, outbound that’s creating more inbound for me.

 

I’m leveraging technology to make sure that I’m calling people that are in the buying window. I’m not wasting my time. I’m using technology to make sure I’ve got incredible context for all of my conversations without me having to spend hours boiling the ocean with research. So, with that, what I’d like to do is the handover to our Tom at Triggr. Who’s going to show you an example of how you can use technology. To drive incredible levels of sales pipeline and make you more effective. Thanks, Tom. Awesome. Thanks so much for that, Tony. It was super insightful. I think what I found interesting was how apathy is now dead in the boardroom and then just the, the sheer pace at which, the collective consciousness of the business world has, has moved throughout COVID and initially it was just pure shock to the system.

 

Whereas now there’s, there’s now a, okay. I now have to do something about this. I’m not sure if we’ll ever say this is the new normal, but this is now a situation that we just have to, to work with.  so in some real world examples, here’s a fun fact for you.   90% of the content of on the internet was created in the last two years.

 

So in terms of doing your research and understanding your, your client, there is a plethora. Plethora of information out there. So most sales reps will be familiar with their CRM and they might have a marketing automation system trying to funnel opportunities into that CRM, as Tony was, was alluding to where we see it is we tap into universal,  untapped data on that, wider internet where there is just an array of information that you can pick up on to understand your clients better. Now this can look like, you know, wrapping the, last lasso potentially around your total addressable market.  Your ICP accounts or your ideal client profile, accounts, or even just monitoring your, your competitor accounts.

 

How, how do we actually make this work for us? Well, at Triggr what we’ve done is we’ve built out a, an automation engine for you to essentially listen out for these trigger events and funnel them through to, through, to the sales rep.  And as Tony was saying, all this is about delivering context for conversation, so that you actually have a perspective to deliver within someone who, who is an ideal client, who is the ideal persona for you to talk to from within that organization.

 

And there is a trigger event for you to, to open up, that conversation. So what I’ll do is I’ll actually run you through, some examples of what this looks like. So if I move over to the next slide here, this is what I have set up for myself. It’s just an example, but it’s some trigger events that I have funnelled through to me. In real time when they occur with the contact details of the person that I need to talk to on the left, you can just see the trigger events, you build them out yourself. You can do a whole array of trigger events. It’s going to depend on your organization. One of the most powerful ones with, or without Triggr is if your customer, or an evangelist changes role.

 

That’s the fastest deal of your life.  they’ve just moved across organizations. You’ve got that relationship.  you want to be alerted whenever that occurs at a, at a business level, and have that funnel through, but then there’s mergers and acquisitions. There’s in, in the example here. Those organizations that are hiring for SDRs, which is essentially sales development reps is very important to Triggr. We have those alerts set up and more importantly, we have, the job titles or, or the personas delivered to us. Now I have removed, the names of these people. It’s just a column on, hidden over on the right here, just in terms of not exposing a whole bunch of data on a public webinar, but,  the contact details of these people are provided with, phone numbers or their direct dial numbe iff it is publicly sourcable, as well as their, their email address. On your day to day, this funnels through to you, you can see here, it will feed into your, your Salesforce instance either automatically or manually pushed. And so before jumping on a call, I’ve just pulled up,  Triggr, which is a company page for ourselves.

 

And as you can see here, we can see their entire technology profile.  All technologies that basically we’ve been able to pick up on from that organization. In this case, it’s Triggr. This is technographics. We can see live job roles posted, throughout any job board in Australia. So, I don’t have to go through all of these different pages to see that I can just look at the different cards here.

 

I can see other lookalike accounts if I want to target, more specific accounts where employees have worked.  Previous to, to Triggr trends and insights. So I can click on understanding what content they’re releasing, and any recent events of significance that have occurred. And then again, here, just at the bottom, you can see, a list of employees with those contact details.

 

I’m happy for my phone number to be out there and, emails here, but being able to access this, push the leads into your CRM as you need them. In terms of being able to analyze what’s in the market, again, all of this is publicly accessible information, but to be able to funnel it into something that’s digestible, takes a lot of research.

 

Intrigued of our approach is just that you can add the filters as you need them. This is employees that are currently hiring more than five people in strategy roles, those that are growing in this environment, you know, is, is it’s, it’s tough to find. So being able to filter through those and then getting a snapshot of what that looks like.

 

Getting a snapshot of what does my patch or my territory look like? What is, organizations that, are either hiring or, the CEOs that are within a certain industry and what they look like? So, on my day-to-day LinkedIn is still, I use it every single day. It’s super important so just clicking here on a Chrome extension, getting that same visibility, seeing what live job roles are available.  and then again, being able to grab that, that person’s contact details. So, you can, give them a call. So, in terms of Triggr as a platform, you know, the whole point here is that there is context for conversations so that, you know, you’re driving your top of funnel pipeline.

 

Particularly when inbound leads, aren’t driving as, high volumes as they would be. So, with that, if there’s any questions that you guys have, we can have a, a bit of a Q and a, open the floor.  this, this wraps up the webinar for today, but what we’ll do is we will we’ll answer any questions that, any questions.

 

Hey, Tom, I just might have a quick chat with you just while you’re having a look to see if there’s any questions.  just make a few comments. So. One of the things that’s interesting is that, when people change jobs out there in the marketplace, on average, it’s about 45 days before they update their LinkedIn profile.

 

Now, I’m not sure what’s behind that with a people think, Hey, I just want to make sure that I’m confident I’ll survive my probation period, you know, before I update my LinkedIn profile or where the people are just a little bit slack, I’m not sure. But the interesting thing about what Triggr does is it identifies, when roles are changing much earlier than what you would find in sales navigator.

 

So, sales navigator is more of a lag.  feeder on people changing a role, whereas Triggr can, can make it more proactive and the opportunity to talk to the boss of the person who’s leaving or changing roles rather than finding out someone got into the role, you know, a month or two months later is obviously more powerful because strategic selling means engaging early at senior levels.

 

So, it’s, it’s something that enables you to do that.  Yeah, that’s exactly right. Engaging early at senior levels. Being able to, essentially pick up on when a trigger event occurs before. Before anybody else?  I’m just looking at a couple of questions that have come in one from Jennifer House.

 

So, can you please give some examples of, of Triggr events? It’s a whole different array of, of trigger events. That really depends on the company.  the most powerful one is role changes.  And, and roles being posted, but there’s also for technology companies when technologies are adopted, when they’re installed, when there’s a combination of technologies that, allude to the fact that they may integrate well with your business, if you’re in the technology space, if.

 

Recruitment being able to automate, essentially roles that are being posted across any organization, searching for within the job descriptions of those job roles to understand the initiatives, that people may be, investing in, one might. Digital transformation. If that’s an investment or an initiative, a company is, is investing in, you can set that up as, as your trigger event, you’ve got, mergers and acquisitions, even things like location changes amongst organizations.

 

If it’s publicly available, then chances are, we should be able to, should be able to, Hey, Tom, I just might provide some example triggering trigger events as well. So certainly, role based, a very powerful, another trigger being could be maybe an organization moving from startup to scale. So, organizations always make press releases, and do announcements.

 

I swear they make announcements and do press releases. Sorry to get that right. So, if you decide organizations that are scaling up, you know, there’ll be a press release. So again, Triggr can monitor for those kinds of things.  one thing that’s really interesting that Triggr does is, if you’re thinking, look, I don’t have a lot of clarity around our ideal customer profile because again, the whole world is not.

 

The, the market for seller you’ll think it’s organizations in these geographies in these vertical industries, they’ll typically have X number of employees. You’ll identify a range of attributes. So, geo vertical and size are probably three of the most fundamental ones. But there’ll be other attributes of organizations that mean they’re probably a better fit for you that you should talk to.

 

and if you can identify, whether they’ve got competitor tech, whether they’ve got complimentary technology, those things really help. And one of the things Triggr does, would that look alike, view the Tom show. Was, if you identify a range of organizations that are a perfect fit or you provide a list of who all of your existing clients are that you regard as ideal fit clients, sadly, for many of us, you know, we have clients that aren’t an ideal fit for us, but just think who are our ideal fit clients trigger can go and, and, using technology.

 

Technology number of employees on a whole lot of other rec attributes, all those organizations, and then go and find others who look like them. That that’s that whole idea of lookalikes. So, you find out the vocalizations that look the same as your ICP. It’s a really powerful thing. Yeah, that’s right. So it’s a combination of, looking at the firmographics technographics and growth trends of an organization.

 

And we’re able to be those look like audiences. I’m just drawing it back to the Q and a, I can see. Kevin, Hey, Kevin. Your question is where does Triggr source data from and would trigger, would a Triggr license make a sales navigator redundant? So. we source our data from essentially the public web it’s the backbone of the trigger platform is, is, our ability to actually pick up publicly accessible information.

 

So, if it’s on the public web, we’ve got a platform that’s essentially able to source it. So that includes the, the information about an organization.  Public trigger events that occur the employee details, contact details, if they’re they’re publicly available as well. And then on the question around, does it make sales navigator redundant?

 

That depends on yourself and how you use sales navigator and the use case, we typically would say that it’s the perfect, complimentary tool to sales navigator. It just depends on how you use it. Certainly in terms of being able to save your views, is quite a manual select each individual account or each individual lead.

 

To set up your alerts in sales navigator, then your patch might change. You have to re save all of those leads.  any organization that has lead rotators, in their business. And they’re only allowed to work, you know, domains or leads that our lead rotator from the CRM sends to them, means constantly updating that feed.

 

So, elements like that can be made a lot easier. In trigger, you can save the parameters rather than the individual lead and then the triggers will get sent through to you. So, it will depend on your use case. One thing that we’re not as a social tool. So, the free LinkedIn version, obviously we we’ve got the Chrome extension to compliment that as well.

 

Okay, one more question, I think, before we wrap it up. So once from Vince, Tom, great session, thanks. In relation to trigger events, how do you see differences engaging with the government sector versus private enterprise? It is a really good question.  in terms of government, in terms of the government.

 

Yeah, one thing that can be tough in government, for the sake of transparency is that, it is that the employee details or any information at all, from the government sector can be, lower in volume.  In terms of the public web, it is tougher to, to pick up on, the government sector. You may see, lower volumes from the government sector, in terms of what you would see in, in, the Triggr platform.

 

Every time I speak to anyone in government, though, they say their biggest pain point is just trying to get any information.  around the government sector, trigger events are still relevant. Selling strategically early and at senior levels is still extremely relevant.  but it’s usually just tougher to find details within government and what we’ve.

 

A few clients who service the government space and they still see the intelligence that we’re able to collect for them is, is extremely relevant. Yeah. Tom, if I can just add a little bit around, around data. I know there was a question about that. Is, obviously the toughest data standards, in the world with GDPR, that’s the data privacy standard in Europe.

 

Probably second to that is in California. So CCPA, regulations of the California consumer privacy act, around, around public data.   but here’s the reality is, the world is swimming in data. And people are making information publicly available. They’re choosing to make it public. Those are very hard profile case a while ago, between LinkedIn, and one of their partners, LinkedIn lost in the interim period, Microsoft at both LinkedIn, they decided to appeal and they lost again.

 

But what the courts ruled is that when members on the LinkedIn platform site, that this data is public, it’s publicly available. And again, LinkedIn, Microsoft, LinkedIn allow Google to scrape all of their public data. That’s why, when you do a Google search for somebody, you’ll find their LinkedIn profile when you do a Google search and you think, but that’s really weird because when I did a search in LinkedIn, I couldn’t find them.

 

You know, how does that work? Well, the problem is, is when you search within LinkedIn, you’re limited to the degrees of connection in the search pool of data that you’re working with. So, if you’re on free LinkedIn, you’re limited to two degrees of connection.  it’s why, if you’re in sales, you should probably connect with me.

 

I’ve got 20,000. First degree connections as we record this. And then all of my connections are available to you in your search results. When you use frees, you want to find nodes in the network that open up the database.  and then if you’re on a, on business or premium version of LinkedIn, it’s that opens up the three degrees and obviously sales navigator is more, but there’s no issue with working with public data.

 

Companies like Triggr and others, what those companies need. And that’s why you work with a Triggr rather than try and do this yourself.   you know, w we offer the right for people to be forgotten in our dataset.   and that’s really the important thing companies needed. I, data privacy officer, where anyone who doesn’t want their information to be there can just request to be forgotten that public data.

 

Is public data and that’s what Triggr is working. What they do is they aggregate and analyze that for you. By looking at the attributes of organizations with trigger events, get that into a mix that gives you a lead funnel. So, you can create a lead funnels that leverage extra Buttes and Triggr events.

 

That indicate higher propensity to buy. And it gives you context for the outreach so that you can drive much higher volumes of effective outreach. That’s really the idea.   and when there’s less leads coming into organizations, we all need to find a way to drive more effective outbound without being a spammer.

 

And the way you avoid being a spammer is as good one-to-one communication, where you’ve got context you’re researched, when you call the person and that’s really the. So, Hey, thanks, Tom. Really appreciate the, the ability to do the webinar for, for Triggr’s audience and, know we’ll do, we’ll do another one.