WEBINAR: Tech-Powered Selling in 2021

Tech-Powered Selling in 2021 Webinar

Thomas Moin, Matthew Cowan and Tony J. Hughes sit down to in a webinar to discuss how to de-risk your sales career.

Sales success is becoming more difficult, especially in the area of opportunity creation, as buyers become desensitized to sales and marketing outreach. Hear how to contextualize conversations for greater engagement and higher success rates. We will also explore what it takes to succeed in noisy and higher competitive markets.

Video Transcribed: 

Morning and welcome to our session today on tech powered selling look,  just before we get started a bit of housekeeping, you’re not going to be able to unmute yourself just a heads up, but, if you’ve got any questions, please enter them into the chat and look, we are waiting for a few more people to join the session.

So while we’re waiting, if everyone could perhaps. Write us a quick note on where you are, perhaps where your location is, what city you’re from myself. I’m from, I’m based in the Philippines from the UK originally spent some time in Australia. It’s kind of long story short right now. I’m in, Makati in Manila and it’s a very wet and a windy day. Derek Stewart is from Melbourne. Great to have you on the session today.

And we’ve also got a couple of people from Sydney. Seems like most of the audience seems to be from Australia. Gary, Chris, and Michael from Brisbane. Ok, we’ll give it 30 more seconds and we’ll, make a start, Jane from Darwin great to have you on board as well. And I hope the weather is a little bit nice the way you are in the Philippines women that live regardless. So it’s been raining for two weeks straight. Now it’s a nice to have a bit of cool weather outside of the 36 degrees, but, or here Sydney is quite pleasant in the moment and Melbourne too, even though it’s a little bit cool with it and then it’s five seasons in one day.

We’ll get started. Anyone else that comes in for out the session. Today I am thrilled to have with us a really special guest, actually two special guests on our session today, Tony Hughes and Thomas Moin on today’s session today, I’ll be interviewing them both. The purpose of that is to discover how sales professionals can aid the risk, their sales career, as well as understanding how businesses business owners, sales teams, can modernize their sales engines with automation to improve sales success across the board. More on this later, let let’s cover some of the contents that we’re going to be looking at today.

Firstly, we’re going to add to a bit of an introduction, so I’m just going to put everyone on mute for a second..

So we’re going to cover a few key points. They, firstly, we’re going to look at some of the old ways of selling, and why they don’t work anymore. And what’s changed. Also we will discover what works in 2021 and one. Is it sales approach? Is it tech or perhaps it’s a combination let’s explore more.

Lastly, we’ll be exploring which technologies you should be prioritizing for your business and perhaps for your team, or even for yourself as a  sales professional, and, and not just to have a heads up, throughout the webinar, we’ll be activating several polls.

Please put your input. Your input is really important and, or make the session a lot more enjoyable and a lot more, useful to patch what you’re looking for in today’s session. Let me introduce myself very quickly. I’ve I have 18 years of sales experience, like I said, my name is Matthew Cowan. I’m based in Southeast Asia moment. I’ve had multiple experience managing teams across UK. Australia and Southeast Asia, most recently, I’m the co-founder of that Matt Cowan prospects in a high end agency where we help sales reps to smash their sales targets and businesses to achieve their revenue targets. I have a couple of books that I’ve offered myself. I’ve made 250,000 calls. It’s probably more like half a million now, but who’s keeping them. My latest book, perfect prospecting, which is designed to help sales professionals to identify perfect clients by providing a seven step checklist to help you flush out the wrong type of clients and qualify the right fit clients. Okay. Now I’ve got a bit of a promotion. I like to say the first 20 registrations will be notified very soon cause you’ll be receiving a physical copy of my book within the next two weeks. Once the official second draft version is ready to go. So you’ll be receiving that very soon. Okay.

All right, moving on. I would like to introduce our first guests. I am so over the moon and super excited to have it on board. Tony Hughes. Many of you will probably be familiar with him. He’s very well known throughout the industry. Tony has a fantastic resume with over 35 years of corporate sales leadership experience. He serves as the advisory board and has been published by the American management association. Tony has also taught sales for Sydney university and the University of New South Wales. And he’s been ranked number one, sales blogger globally by both top sales magazine and best sales blogger awards. Tony, I am so excited to have you on board today.

Thank you for joining us. Thanks man, me too, really looking forward to the conversation and questions from the audience today. Great stuff, Tony. All right. Our second guest, introducing Thomas Moin. Thomas, again, really happy to have you on our core session today. Thomas has a fantastic career with Hubspot. He was actually one of the founding original founding members of HubSpot Australia. So he’s got tons of experience in that space and sales automation. He’s a specialist in modern sales, that engagement he’s actually the co-founder of Triggr a platform that helps sales teams to grow pipeline with real time sales alerts that turn prospects into highly motivated buyers.

Again, more on that later, but look, Thomas really happy to have you on board today. I’m really excited to learn about your experience in the sales automation space. Thanks, Matt, with an introduction like that, there’s no better way to start the day. I’m really looking forward to the session today. Yeah.

Great to hear mate, great to hear. So let’s get started with our first talking point. We would like to explore why some of the old ways of selling. Don’t work anymore and we want to know why. Before we start, we’re going to run our first poll. Okay. So I’d like the audience to be as engaging as possible in this.

We want to know what, when it comes to sales, whether a business owner, sales, professional team leader, whatever it might be, we want to know what’s your biggest problem. Okay. It’s not enough sales pipeline. We are unable to create progression in deals, losing deal with the competition, or is it something else?

Right. So we’re going to get that started now. So please engage in that as much as possible. Okay. Now I want to look at some of the reasons that really resonate with me with that statement. So why is it the old ways of selling don’t work anymore. What what’s changed? How has selling changed? Well, we all know stunning significantly changed over the last 10 years, in my opinion, in the last couple of years.

Right. I think we can all agree that COVID-19 is as certainly sped up this evolution. Right. Professionals and executives across the globe are even more time poor than ever before. Right. Everyone is fighting for C-level time tops. I think we can all agree on that. Demand for information is ever increasing.

A lot of executives are not answering phones, but they’re doing their research. So 80% of bars are now doing their research before talking to vendors and suppliers. When you get on the phone with your potential prospects, right, they already know about you. Right? The other thing is business owners are constantly hunting for more efficient practices to save costs and create more out o less.

I can really see this change in my business life, it’s been really hard to reach, professionals likely it used to reach perhaps 10%. So you make 10 calls now with a warm or cold calls, right? Or even existing should reached about 10 to 50% of those. Right. It’s now less than half of that. Right?

So my clients are also expecting more out of less. So I’ve personally had to be on the hunt for ways to modernize my sales engine and create better automation. So I can access real time contact information, real time intelligence and provide a better service to my clients. Right. So I guess, on that note, Tony, I’d really like to understand from your experience, I guess over the years, and the last couple, what do you think are some of the reasons why selling has changed in the last 18 to 24 months?

Hi, Matt, just before I jump into that, maybe tool slides and yeah, we’ll just, just on gallery view for everybody, for the conversation. So the thing we know is there’s a whole bunch of trends that are creating headwinds for sellers. You know, there are some businesses that are fortunate enough where.

What’s going on with COVID and lockdowns has actually helped them, but for many it’s made a tougher. The reality is is 2020, 2021 has been a capitalist year for accelerating things are already going on. So what we know for many organizations is average deal sizes have been getting smaller. The need to gather consensus before you get a decision inside an organization has become even greater. There’s definitely the sense that there’s increased competition. So it’s increasingly easier for buyers to try and make what we provided commodity, and get other people involved in the conversation. Sure, and the failure rates of sellers, especially in B2B enterprise selling the failure rates are getting higher, you know, I’ll commonly see in organizations, failure rates of 70% and above and it’s really a common thing. So from the buyer’s side, they feel that they’re getting blasted and spammed to death. The average person receives well over a hundred emails a day. So it’s a very, it’s increasingly very noisy world. So it’s tough for buyers to find a way to break it.

Fantastic. And look, you’ve released a book recently. You’ve covered a lot of what a lot of these pain points that I’ve mentioned. Can you tell us, in your opinion, what is, what is tech powered selling? What. Well, the thing we know about the future is it’s increasingly filled with technology and there’s no professional on the face of the planet that’s immune to disruption. So whether you’re a lawyer, a pathologist, an accountant, a pilot, yeah. Every, every single profession. If anyone in those professions dares decide, look, you know, I love what I do. I love being a pilot. I’m just wanting to, into the tech. Yeah, can’t be a pilot. If you’re not into the tech, you can’t be a pathologist or a surgeon or an accountant or a lawyer. I can’t be any of those things if you’re not embracing technology. So we’ve always known that people need homes. IQ. While if you need reasonable IQ to succeed in sales, you need high EQ to succeed. But increasingly today we also need TQ. We need technical question. We need to know how to use our tools, what I call our tech stack to know how to use that effectively if we’re going to get the, the, the level of efficiency and effectiveness that we need.

That’s great. That’s fantastic. I guess I want to direct a, a question that, Thomas, so Thomas is one of the founding members of HubSpot, to now running a very successful sales enablement automation platform Triggr, which I personally use. What do you envision as some of the future technologies that you are really excited about for sales, automation and sales enablement, and what, what is baking in the oven, you know, in your opinion?

Well, if, if I look back to even when we first started HubSpot, in Australia, at least, which was, which was 2014, you know, it was a sales rep would be enamored just to be able to call an ebook down and that was with the birth and information of, of inbound marketing. And, and that really is, you know, a warm lead. It’s not a hand raiser, but being able to say, Hey, so you downloaded this ebook. should we. Well that doesn’t cut it anymore. You know, you actually have to have, you have to have relevance towards the event that’s occurred. You have to actually have an understanding or insight behind that customer, rather than just saying, Hey, you downloaded this ebook. So we’ve come a long way just in, in seven years. In terms of where things are going, it’s going to get more contextual. It’s going to get more predictive.

And so for the, for the sales rep, for them to, to, to stand out, they need to be more human. Because what we’re saying is the technology is going to start taking over more and more of the repetitive tasks. So where does, where does the sales rep fit within that? Now at the moment, there’s this, the rise of sales engagement tools platforms like outreach sales, loft, HubSpot sequences, Salesforce has high velocity sales.

Yeah. This is the formation of technology starting to take over those repetitive tasks. There’s two ways that can go a lazy rep can say, great, I’m going to enrol a hundred sequences and just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. But there’s no insight behind that. So the future of the sales rep is to be more human. They actually have to have that insight and then form the perspective behind it. Now in the, in the short term, I mean, right now, you know, we’ve got video prospecting, audio transcription,  deep fakes, are out there on the web and that’ll, you know, soon get developed into usable ways for sales reps, I think in the medium, future as well, canned responses to this, all this stuff exists already.

Now in our space with, with Triggr, what, what we’re working on in the sales intelligence space, you’re going to be able to use public data to, to surface the next person that you should. Okay. And you’re going to see a world where you can benchmark your historical deals in your CRM, where AI will surface, the next person and company you should talk to based off of what’s happening on the public.

I mean, it’s, it’s changing so fast, but, yeah, there’s, there’s lots of stuff to look forward to. Thank you, Tony and  Thomas for those insights. And then, and just look, there’s three things I’ve taken out of that. Tony, I have to agree. Average deal sizes. All are getting smaller. Look, I think finding rates from what I’m hearing.

So when I talk to my clients, one of the biggest things I hear is, you know, in that RSTs, aren’t performing, we’re struggling with a top level pipe. So yeah, I do agree in that space. You know, there are, there are a lot more failure rates and sales rates of moving from one role to another, needs to be a one to two years cycle. You’re right. No one is immune to change. And I like your pilot analogy. Cause I know you have some experience in that space, Tony. My father was. I was a part of for many, many years. And, and you’re right. If you don’t use the technology, the plane is not going to stay in the sky for very long.

Right. So it’s very, very interesting. And Thomas your insights. Fantastic. Just, you’re right. The future is to be more human, but, or more automated, same time. And we’re really looking forward to that new technology. So look, just to summarize the first poll,  it seems like the majority of, the biggest problem seems to be not enough pipe.

So 54% of people are, are struggling with that new pipe. Is that a shock to you, Tony? Is that what you kind of expect? No I’m at,  all with all the companies I work with around the world, the number one problem, you know, which is maybe a symptom of real problems. And I’m one problem they say they’ve got is, is not enough sales pipeline and just system healthy quality pipeline is curable ills i typically find in selling. You know, it’s how you, de-risk the forecast to tell you avoid, you know, feeling like your age a whole year of your life at the end of every quarter Just to key in with what Tom was talking about previously, because I really agree with him, the danger for people today in them embracing technology is that if you just load spam, into your Gatling gun of automation, you know, the sales engagement platforms, email sequences, you know, all you’re going to do is damage your brand faster and alienate more people in the market that reply to you and say, please remove me from, you know, from your mailing list or your database.

So it’s really important that we knew once the way that we use technology. Technology doing the things that we should not be doing. Those automateable tasks in the background. And then we drive strong human engagement. The future of selling is absolutely where we’re a buyer intent meets seller relevance, and the technology is doing the match making.

Tom really alluded to this, if we think about our ideal customer profile. So I have clarity about the attributes of an organization that defines our ideal customer. So the whole world is not a prospect, so there’ll be geographic things, vertical industry. Are they growing if they’ve got other technology or competitors incumbent that we’re good at replacing or complimenting.

So we’re very clear about the attributes of who we’re targeting. Then we understand those buyer personas we’re working with. Yeah. Can we do that? Well, you know, I, we can build good, good message and conversation narrative. But the other thing is we know what to look for in terms of trigger events, give us that relevance because buyer expectations today are really tough.

Before we even got to ask them one question, they expect us to already know them. So we need to, we need to turn up, you know, showing them that, that we’re researched. And we’ve got a worthwhile point of view for them in the conversation because they’re certainly not interested in us all they are interested in is how they can drive improved results in their roles. So we’ve got to use tech on the background. Automateable things to drive stronger human engagement at the front end display. I couldn’t agree with you more, Tony. Absolutely. You got to create compelling value value fast, and you’ve got to show that you’ve done your research because, now let’s decide is 15 other people that have caught a Cielo at C-level executives on that day, and they haven’t done their research, you want to be the one that stands out, right. You have to be in order for them to, you know, to listen to you, right? Yeah. Great stuff. Look. So we’re going to open up the, the session for a quick Q and a for the first point. If anyone has got any questions, please, open the chat box and write your question.

We’d love to hear if there’s any individual questions that you’d like to, ask and I’ll just open that up. So we’ve got one coming in from James, born in Sydney. He’s science become increasingly harder for his team to reach senior executives. And he’s asking why, why this is, look, I guess, in my opinion, based on what Tony stated and myself, it’s, it is becoming increasingly harder to reach, senior executives because they’re more stressed and busy than ever before.

The reality behind it, You know, can we improve that? Yeah. We use tools to reach people on mobile phones. Yes, we can improve that in a number of different forms by calling at different times. That’s a great, very good point. Tony, do you have any input on that? So the thing with trying to sell into the C suite, they live in a very noisy world and anything that looks like marketing or spam or anything that’s from somebody they don’t know, their immediate bias is ignore or delete. And if I’ve got an EA that got people getting rid of that. So we, so we have to find a way to be highly relevant to them as the first thing. So talking about us is, is straightaway and epic fail.

The other thing is that we need to find their cell phone or their mobile. Right. There’s tools out there including Triggr who works for that can give you people’s mobile phone numbers, so my advices you need to pattern interrupt.  You can see over my shoulder here, that’s, that’s the book combo prospecting, but we need to pattern and interrupt the way that people ignore us.

But we need to do it with the right message and we need to go with them directly through all of the relevant channels. So up in Asia, it can be, you know, WhatsApp or Wechat. Yeah, it’s in these messages, even sending people a calendar invitation. I know that sounds off the wall and he’d never do that in your first sequence, but in followup sequences, it’s incredibly powerful, right?

So the idea is you make their mobile device buzzing. So they think, man, this person’s determined. I need to answer this or get back to them. Here’s a really simple technique, even finding a few phone and it goes through to voicemail, phone back again. Often they go, oh yeah, this person’s calling back, that must be important. I’ll answer the phone. There’s no, there’s things we can do, but you don’t have the right conversation narrative or the right message. You’ll just be annoying. Right. So, got to show them that you know them and have a point of view about how they can drive, improve results in their role.

Tony, I’ve read your book, combat prospecting, and actually transformed the way that. I manage my entire business, for any sales professionals out there. And I, Tony has got a few books out there and in his new book, tech powered sales read it,  it works as long as you have a compelling message.

The process is far more effective and it does, it does get people’s attention and, and you will, people foster absolutely great stuff. It looks, let’s move on to our next point in the interest of time. I guess our next talking point, what we want to understand is what works now in 2021. And why is it the approach, the sales approach? Is it technology? Is it a combination of both and we’re also going to run our next poll? What I’d like to understand from the audience is, what are your top three technologies that you’re currently using as a seller? As a business owner, as a, as an entrepreneur. Okay, so I’m going to start that poll now.

So, if you can play as a game players that they base engaging as possible and we’ll go for those results shortly. So I guess in my opinion, you’ve got to pro and this goes to everything that Tony’s been saying. We’ve got to provide value quickly and effectively to prospect clients. We’ve got to make sure you have a compelling message that drives exactly where the benefits lie and how you will solve your prospects, you know, potential issues or, or challenges, right.

You need to reach them faster. Right. You need to get contact details. Mobile phone numbers, using tools such as Triggr is it’s a number of tourists doing it by this Lusha, my personal preference Triggr, will help you to reach executives on their mobile phone, faster with professionals working from home, the switchboard is becoming more redundant in my opinion.

Actually when COVID hit, I remember trying to reach individual the switchboard. I couldn’t even transfer people because, I didn’t have the technology for, for about six or seven months to do that. Right, then once you reached them, as Tony said, we need to show compelling value, right? So you gather sales intelligence by using these tools again, such as Triggr, to receive up to date intelligence on your target audience developments, new technologies, C-level movement, C-level publications, stuff that you can reference on your call really, really important and you need to automate the sales engine. I, you need to take advantage of AI tools and tools such as HubSpot, professional, HubSpot sales, Salesforce, Hubspot CRM. There’s so much out there and I guess it can be confusing. Hence while they’re running a session like this to hopefully get an insight on what is the best approach right.

To get started. My personal example, I, I was looking at ways, as I mentioned to automate my own sales engine. Did invest in smart automation tools like HubSpot professional took me a while to do it. But when I did it, I want to sign up to Triggr almost immediately. I was able to offer better compelling value to my clients when I showcase these tools for my clients, they’re blown away and they want to know how they, their sales team can use those tools as well.

So I’m meeting my ever-growing existing client needs and significantly modernizing the sales engine for another five years or 10 years even. Right, Tony, what do you think? Did you agree? Is there anything you would add. Yeah, before we talk about a bad technology, the most important thing for sellers is to time block their day.

Okay. The easiest thing to not do every day and the thing that has no immediate consequences in not doing it every day is prospecting. There’s always other things that seem more important. Phone calls. We need to return admin tasks. We need to do to get my expenses in or whatever those things are. So most sellers are busy doing enough to not feel guilty about their performance, rather than do what it actually takes to be successful.

So everybody needs to reverse engineer their own metrics. They need to think about, okay, I’ve got, I’ve got this annual or quarterly target. I’ve already closed X. You know, I can see a path to Y there’s now a Delta, you know, whatever your metrics are. Let’s say I need three times coverage, qualified pipeline coverage to hit that number.

So I need three times that in, in, in, in covering the Delta, what’s my average deal size. You know, what are my ratios from calls to meetings, from meetings to being qualified from qualified to proposal, you know, all the way through to being able to close and work out, you know, how many calls I can make in an hour or combos I can execute and then time block it.

So the first thing is to time block, it’s critically important. The next thing I’d really talk about is that, we know that the cost of acquiring a new client is massively higher than retaining or growing existing clients. But more than that, we know that there’s magic in referrals. So if we can monitor or if we look at our entire customer base and monitor people that get promoted or move, we follow them into the new organization. We follow them up as they get promoted in the organization. And they’re really interestingly if you’re just using site, for example, LinkedIn or sales navigator to monitor for that on average people, don’t update LinkedIn for about a month and a half until after they’ve got the new jobs. Often there’s already a big lag, but we want to follow supporters of ours into their new organization because in essence, it’s a referral and it’s a trigger event that’s combined and it’s truly a one plus one equals five, right? Because you beginning with a level of trust with someone you’ve already delivered for the person that tied them is typically wanting to back them. Any new senior person into a role has got about a three to five month window where their boss will approve most of the things they ask for. After that, there are not a tired, broken person. That’s not delivering for the senior manager, like get back early. So if they go in and say, Hey, I need this in my new role. I’ve worked with this organization in the previous company, you approve this, you know, often I’ll get it approved a year later.

They’ll struggle. So sure. Triggr events and referrals combined together, fastest path, highest probability to selling activity. That’s a really good point. Sign-in and, and I can re relate that to my own business. Most of the best, I guess, the most prominent clients that I work with are from referrals right quick, it’s quicker to bring on board quicker to gain the trust.

A lot of people forget and, and something that I wasn’t doing until recently was calling up my clients and, and, and asking, you know, what they like about working with me and asking for referrals. A lot of, sales people, I think fail to, to go down that route and the find out those sorts of things.

So, so Tony, but based on that, what do you think the future of sending looks like in your opinion? I know we’ve covered a few points in the other, in other part of the session, but what, what’s the future of selling in the next 10 years in your opinion? Well, met the future of selling is, is automation and tech.

So might just touch on that in just for everybody listening to this, we all know, we need to ask for referrals. But using that phrase with a prospect is the kiss of death, you know, say, Hey, would you be able to give me a referral? Because what they hear is, you know, Hey, can you introduce me to someone in your network that will think that you, that you introduced to sell it to them?

Right? So we don’t ask it that way. No one wants a cell up pestering their friends, but what we can ask is, Hey, who else in your network? Has been struggling or is struggling with the same things that you were, you know, before we worked together. Who else in your network do you think could benefit from understanding what you’ve been able to do?

So, one of the really important things in selling is intent. We do not want to convey the intent. That we want to make our sale. We want to convey the intent that we’re all about helping the other person in their role personally and professionally. We’re all about trying to understand, Hey, does a conversation even make sense?

You know, I don’t want to waste your time. So we don’t have commission breath when we’re talking to people. So when we look at what the future of selling, it’s all about automation. So if we can automate the tracking. Right. Our referral opportunities and things that go on in the marketplace to give us relevance and context or reason in the eyes all been in the mind of the buyer for us having the conversation right now.

Now we’re plowing the field ahead of us and making our job much, much easier. So you can automate the monitoring of trigger events, you know, is what I think is the most powerful thing. Well, and obviously there’s all of the other workflow processes, web to lead processes. We can automate things like forecasting in CRM systems with AI. There’s lots and lots of things. There’s there’s tools like Bombora out there where we can, we can assess, buyer sentiment, right? Where we’re dealing with organizations with high propensity to buy often those things they’re already looking at competition, which is actually the problem with that. So strategic selling by definition means getting engaged earlier.

So Tom, I might even throw to you to talk about how you can automate trigger events. It’s so powerful. Yeah. I mean, on the point of referrals as well, Going to raise that point organization should think about in terms of referrals, what is, one of the best referrals that you can get? And it’s, it’s ideally going to be a happy customer of yours or someone that you’ve worked with before.

So, one of, one of the trigger events that’s most common and powerful and, possible to actually set up is monitoring and tracking all of your existing customers inside your CRM or your power users or your champions, however you want to slice it. And then through that, being notified whenever they change roles into your ideal customer profiles, there’s kind of two, two approaches to that. One is how do you, how do you scale away for you to track and monitor? Your existing customers. And then how do you get alerted when they land in the accounts that you actually care about? In terms of, trigger events, that’s, that’s the no-brainer trigger event that I think every organization should be able to set up unless you’ve just started your business and you don’t have that, that install base to, to rely on.

All of these areas of change. Business, any change in the status quo is what we would see it as. That’s the opportunity for the rep to actually get in early. And you’re not going to get caught into a race to the bottom of the price list. You know, if, if they’re just going and filling out, contact us forms to your five different competitors, when you’re in that buying mode, still need to do that.

But you’re not going to get that 3 X coverage if that’s your own. Great stuff. Thank you so much. That’s, that’s very insightful. Me personally using Triggr, that’s what I’ve started doing at the moment, and I’ve already started seeing the results. Your, technology is making my life much easier.

So let’s summarize. So Tony. we need to start blocking out our day, whether you’re calling at eight in the morning until 10:00 AM or four in the afternoon to six or both, we’ve really got to make sure that, that we’re very sales professionals have to be disciplined on that approach locking out the day on those activities.

The cost of acquiring new clients. As you mentioned, Tony is extremely high compared to referrals and one plus one equals five, right? For the referrals that you’re going to get, but don’t directly ask straight out for referral. I’m guilty of that. I have done that and I think your approach works much better.

I have to agree that you have to show value and how are you going to help that individual? How are you going to help someone then that look as opposed to just asking straight out for referral could be considered rude in some ways, I guess if you do it the wrong way. Yeah, we’ve got to start automating, technology.

That’s the future of sales or automate trigger events and Thomas, what you’ve mentioned, automating your referrals. How cool is that? You can automate a segment of your client and target market in order to make sure that you automate and you’re prepared and ready, for when it’s time to, to talk to them or when they have a potential opportunity and join them at the right cycle. So when you get them on the phone that the cycle that they’re in is the cycle for buying, right. It makes sense. Yeah. Okay, great. so I looked the results of the poll in, so we all taught three technologies that use on a daily basis. And, there’s a little bit of HR, LinkedIn navigator and CRM that are the top.

So 68% are using this CRM, which is really good. CRM automation around 34% but LinkedIn navigator and establish data and CRM texts into the two things that I use on a daily basis. I guess my personal view is like a CRM would be something that’s been used for many, many years. I think to navigate if you’re having a LinkedIn navigator sales person, I think there’s a problem.

Where are you going to pay for it? So for your company tie for it, Tony, it’s almost, if you got any views on that, That those are the foundations of any graphics. You’re not using your CRM and you’re not using LinkedIn. I’m not sure what you’re doing. So no surprises there at all. Those, those are the foundations.

Yeah. And the thing, the thing that’s typically missing for people is, is that sales intelligence data. So, you know, email addresses, phone numbers, but more importantly, the contextualize information, the, the big Achilles heel for most sellers is they spend way too much time trying to research. Only to never get hold of the person.

So we need a way of, of doing pragmatic research that gives us the personalization. So, so we know the brevity and personalization is one of the key things in effective outreach, both on the phone and with emails. So, so tools that help with that. Yeah. Great stuff and look, we can open up the,  the question again for, we can open up the chat for the audience.

So if anyone has any questions, please fire away we’ve, we’ve already got one, and this is probably more from the other, other poll that we ran. So I’ve got a, so I can’t say it’s name, but a chat from Melbourne, who works for a starup. I own a tech company.  He wants to know the best time to reach the, when is the best time to call, I guess, and obviously if you reach people on mobile phone numbers, is there a certain time they should, that people should be calling. In my opinion, I think you start reaching people at eight in the morning. Onwards till about 10:00 AM and about four o’clock till about six o’clock. I even reached people when they’re walking their dog and they’re actually quite receptical. Some people not so much, but,  they’re a little bit more relaxed out of the work environment.

Tony you want any, you go to your, your opinion on that, which of you on that best on. Yeah. So, so well, pre COVID the times of day that people traveled was the perfect time to be calling people. Even if they’re on public transport, they maybe wouldn’t answer their phone on a train or a bus or subway, but they, they looking at their email, they looking at LinkedIn and the odds are you’re making their device doesn’t ding and they’ll look, they’ll they’ll look.

Yeah, so typically lunchtimes are really powerful shoulders of the day. Most powerful. We don’t want be calling an evening’s invading people’s personal life. Sure and increasingly in our people on traveling in the morning, but they’re trying to get their kids set up the homeschooling or whatever they’re doing, but I’ve had plenty of silicide I’ve phoned somebody, the person says, look, I’m just doing the school run with the kids. Yeah. I can, can you call me back in five minutes? Like they’re, they’re happy to take the call. Yeah.  I just to respond to a question that, that, or comment that’s coming from, Steven Cannes about the fact that. He’s just said that LinkedIn has no relevance for B to C. I just may be Steven, maybe challenge that a little.

You know, I know when I’ve bought a motor vehicle, you know, I’m regarded as a, B to C buyer, right? I’m not a, not a buying as a business. I’m just buying as a consumer. Well I’ve had are either really good Lexus sales person then engage me in LinkedIn. So a lot of B2C buyers, if they’re white collar professionals.

And if we look at the Australian market, for example, there’s nine and a half million LinkedIn members, two people join LinkedIn a second worldwide, more than 90% of white collar professions. In developed economies, I’ve got LinkedIn profiles and even in government, it’s becoming more common. And people are very open to being, contacted in a business context in LinkedIn.

Often they pushed back. If you do it in, in, in a, in a platform like Facebook, you know, they regard that is just for their family and personal life. But unlike sellers engaging in Facebook often, But they’re more exhibiting quality in LinkedIn. So even if they engage in a B2C context and Facebook on those platforms, it’s powerful to go to another channel. And see if you catch them in something like LinkedIn. Everyone’s different. Everyone will have a preferred channel. You don’t know what it is until they respond to you in one of those channels. Very good, Tony. I have to agree a hundred percent. Okay, great, so I think we’ve got one more question.

So what’s the best intro message to get senior corporate managers to connect on LinkedIn. That’s a really good question. In the mail. I don’t really respond to many InMails funnily enough, unless there’s a compelling message behind it. I do believe that, you do have to have the right messaging and again, do your research and use those trigger events and intelligence before writing them.

What are you reconciling? That that’s my view on it from, from my experience. Okay. So, so the thing here is there’s some rules in LinkedIn never connect themselves. So don’t, don’t combine trying to give them a pitch. With the process of getting them to accept your connection request and you need to send them a connection request that shows relevance in their mind.

So if you connect your request says, hi, Mike, a huge fan of what your company’s doing, great to connect to in LinkedIn. It can really be that simple, right. What you want to do is Hey Mike, where the global market leader and XYZ seller seller, trying to weasel their way into my life. So just separate connecting from selling. So just connect, you want to connect with all of the thought leaders in your industry. Think about where the, my customers go to for information, who do they respect gone, connect yourself to all of them. So if you’re going to connect yourself to a journalist or an analyst, you’d say, hi, Mike, huge, huge fan of what you write, I share your reports regularly with my clients, or I share your content with my clients. They’ll happily accept that connection request because you’re promoting them. There’s a concept of, you know, we want to kind of marry up in life, associated ourselves with people of greatest standing. Do you want to do that in social as well?

So, so build out your social proof of the quality of people, separate selling from connecting. So connect then later provide a little bit of value. Say, Hey, Mike came across this rapport little, would it be relevant maybe to send that through? Right. So definitely give it a week to 10 days before you start to try and sell to somebody.

Great stuff, Donnie. Thank you. We’ve got another question in from John. What do you think of online tenders when the relationship aspect is not there, but the customer wants to provide a level playing field to get a great solution. That’s an interesting one. Well I used to work for a large tech companies when it came to tenders.

It always used to find, you could tell if they were written for you or not.So we kind of used to respond based on that. Yeah, I haven’t got, I guess, a great deal of experience in that space, but, I guess what’s helped me in the past is actually having a relationship before the tenders are released and that’s not always possible.

Well I do try the sneaky approach of, Hey, you know, who do I need to connect to and have that relationship with? So I can find out if that tender’s going to be written for us or not. If we’re going to have, I guess, a higher priority. Yeah. Tony, do you wanna add anything to that? And I’ll, try to tell him, I’m sure he’ll have a view of this, but a couple of things from me.

The first thing is there’s no shortage of prospects in the market for us, but that’s the mindset we need. What there is, is the shortage of hours in the day within which we can execute. And the worst thing we can do is to waste that time, pursuing things that go nowhere and worse than that, dragging into that crazy person’s pursuit, the precious resources in our own organization.

It damages our own brand, huge opportunity costs, pursuing things that aren’t going to convert to anything for the customer or us. So. If you receive a tender that you knew you knew nothing about you need a bias to filing it in the shredder. Right? So you’d think, look, I’ve done. The I’m going to reply, respond to this because I had no influence in it.

And then you have a quick look and you look for the sticky, evil fingerprints of your competition in that document. So is there any bias which we should all know what our competitors will see seek to put in there and then and if you see those, I would tend to qualify out again, but then here’s the real thing.

Whenever you qualify any opportunity, attend a bid document or not, it’s the degree to which the customer was shared with us, insider knowledge and give us access to other people that form the decision power based in consensus that determines whether you should keep going. If they won’t give us insider information or they won’t give us access to others, we’re never gonna know.

Right. Yeah. And if you knew nothing about the document and you see bias toward a competitor, then just steer away from it. Yeah, I a hundred percent agree in that. Don’t be shy in challenging attender that gets sent through to you. And exactly, as you said, you can usually see straight away that this has been a template that they’ve been given from, from a competitor or something like that.

So scan through it, see for those. Certain little bits or requirements that are just a little too nuanced for it to be something that they would have come up with yourself or themselves. Then challenge them on that. There’s, there’s some research that’s come out recently in terms of,  how healthy is your deal and it is how quickly they, the back and forth is between you and the customer. How what’s the velocity of email exchange. If they’re not replying to you over long periods of time, it’s, it’s not a good time. Whereas if. Really giving you those insights as Tony said, but there’s really high philosophy and exchange of communication.

Then that’s, that’s a sign of a healthier deal. Hey, hi Matt. I’m just saying some great comments here for the alum.  what pages, stroke or T typed in a little while ago when we sell it’s called pitch slapping. I really liked that. Love it really. I really like what gunner has said in here as well. You know, this idea of attraction marketing is really powerful.

You know, if, if you can put up content online that attracts people, especially around trigger events, you know, they go on in the marketplace. Cause if something happens to create relevance, one of the things we should all be asking ourselves, whether we’re a marketer or a seller, we need to ask ourselves this question.

What do I customers search for online? Before they never know to look for me. Right? So giving an example of this sport I do with my family is white boarding and we got a bigger boat. Now, what that meant was that was a trigger event. That meant we needed a bigger car to tow it because the current cop wouldn’t tow that boat.

So that was actually a trigger event. But when I got online looking for new cars or forward drives to tow the boat, I didn’t search for any of the brains. I searched for 3,500 kilos towing capacity. To my shock and dismay, not one of the four wheel drive manufacturers had content up online against that search term.

Right. They were all just narcissistically putting up content about, you know, their land cruiser patrol, you know, whatever the four wheel drive was. So we’re going to think about, you know, with attraction marketing, what are people looking for before they ever know to look for us? They’ll typically search around their problem domain.

Hey, yeah. There’s another question here too, about, you know, what, what are the best tools or platforms out there for sourcing that sales intelligence data? Right. So there’s probably one of the biggest companies in the world is zoom info that acquired discover org. And they’re really good for north American data.

Far less so in Asia and especially far less on a place like Australia, Tom from the call is with Triggr. Trigg has got amazing, ANZ data. So if you’re an Australian New Zealand region, they’ve got amazing data,  not just around buying intent, but also the phone numbers and email addresses. The recruiting industry tend to use a tool called Lusha. It tends to be pretty strong in Europe, ah, and good in other markets. Yeah, if you’re in Australia market, I’d probably recommend Triggr if you’re up in Asia, probably something like Lusha, probably although tiny firstly, notice with Triggr, Singapore and Hong Kong, the thought is getting much better.

We do receive quite a few Triggr events for prospects in Singapore.  I’ve noticed mobile phone numbers are getting a lot more accurate in Southeast Asia. So it’s certainly developing operations already outside of ANZ. Loving the accolades guys. Just to comment on that. So we launched Asia data a couple of months ago, which is cool, exciting for us.

It’s, you know, it’s, it’s great that we’re now expanding the footprint in, in APAC. And it makes sense that you’re seeing the improvement across those, regions. Triggr was launched three years ago with the focus on Australia. So that’s really been the bread and butter of us recently expanding across.

Great stuff. So I think just for the interest of time,  for the audience, Tony and Thomas, let’s move on to our final point. Feel free to drop me if, if anyone’s got anything else they want to add before we do that, what I want to do now is I want to start looking at some of the technologies that the, or anyone on the audience can start prioritizing. So whether you’re a business, a business owner, or a team sales team manager or sales professional, so we want to understand what are the best parts of technologies you’d recommend maybe to get people started. So we’re also going to run a final poll. So I’ll get that started now again, please.

Please input on that and, we’ll just start that in three two one. So what we want to understand for the final poll is, What is the number one story? No, that’s not correct. no, that’s correct. We want to understand what is the number one cause of not having enough qualitfy pipeline, in your opinion, right?

Is there, is it unable to reach buyers? Not enough time for prospecting too much time spent researching prospects? Not enough sales resources, like have the poll started. So yeah, please complete that. And again, we’ll review that at the end of, end of the discussion. Well, I guess again, in my opinion, and for what I’ve observed over the last few years in my business, it really depends on your business sales, maturity.

How do you manage a sales engine? have you got a fully developed sales and marketing team? Perhaps you start looking at things like CRM, automation and HubSpot professional and Salesforce and all those other things. If, you’ve got those things in place, or perhaps. You don’t have a sales team or maybe you have a sales team.

How big is that sales team? And does your company have a lead management process within yourselves engine knew you, you might want to consider marketing tools such as linked to navigator and trigger as, as we’ve been mentioning throughout the call, right? It really depends on the evolution of where you are and the type of business and, and what you’re looking to achieve.

Marketing framework. Do you have a marketing man? A full-time marketing person? Is it part-time? Is it outsourced? maybe you don’t have one or maybe you gotta look at tools such as Marketo and HubSpot marketing, right? It really depends. I mean, for me personally, I don’t have a sales team. I’m kind of a one man band when you look at my organization, but I have 10 to 15 staff that represent many clients from all over the globe, but they’re not part of mine.

I guess in depth, not counting prospecting sales team, but I still needed to take the plunge and invest in my own automation, to help improve my client experiences and help me to reach potential buyers. I’m very busy. I lot like Tony, we just don’t have time. Now to grow our businesses. So it’s really important.

The more that we can automate, the better that we have at focusing on the entrepreneurial part of the business and actually growing the organization and, and attracting better clients. Right. so like next question, I’m about to ask you is to Tony to start with, what are the other types of sales, activities, and processes that can be automated outside of what we’ve discussed?

I want to, to all to Thomas as well. And I even want to do if, if you’re a business owner here, first thing I would encourage you to think about is, is the web to lead process. We, we know that response times matter massive. Well, it’s hugely important that you respond quickly to any lead that comes in.

So we definitely want to adopt this, this attraction, marketing, this content marketing approach. What do people look for before that even overlooked for us rather than the lazy thing of spending a fortune on ad words, right? Optimize for, for the, for the content that is relevant to people. And if they fill in a form, make sure you get back from the website, India, CRM that triggers someone following up.

So. If you’ve got a bigger team, even think about, the way you can allocate leads based on availability. Right. You know, rather than I went to this person, but they took four days to respond. Right. So your chances of engagement just fall, fall off a cliff. So automate web to lead, think about attraction marketing.

The other thing is I was having a great conversation with Peter Strohkorb. Who’s on this call. Peter’s an absolute expert in marketing and bringing sales and marketing together. But we were talking about how do you avoid wasting time? Because I think someone else has said in here, what about all of these leads?

That come through that aren’t really leads at all. They’re just a waste of time for the sales person. So how do you get the prospect to self-qualify themselves rolling different sales environments, and there’s smart ways of doing that. So maybe even talk to Peter, if you’ve got questions about that later.

So the first thing is the web to lead process automate that. The other thing I’d say automate is, is you want to automate the time-wasting activity of research of salespeople. They just waste so much time doing ineffective research. And that’s the power of a platform like trigger because it gives you attributes about the organizations that you’re targeting.

It gives you the phone numbers, the email addresses, the trigger events that have gone on the roles they’re hiring for, where they got most of this stuff from, you know, from other organizations in the marketplace, tools like sales navigator are also great as well. You know, you can see what roles they’re typically hiring in.

People expect us to show them that we know. When we spring from the bushes in this brand new conversation, it’s the, if we can talk the language of leaders and show that we’re relevant, show them that we know them, then we’ll drive engagement. So give sellers back time in their day, by automating the research piece and serve them lists of people that they should be targeting based on highest propensity to buy.

The last thing I’ll say is rather than think about brand new whizzbang technologies. Also think about how do I use the things I’ve got properly? You know, most sellers I talk to. If they’ve got navigator, they have no idea how to use the wizard properly to build a bully, safe search that they can run regularly.

That’ll help them sell most sellers don’t know how to configure a simple dashboard for themselves in their own CRM. Right. So, so use the basic tools that you’ve got. Well, you know, and then add something like triggered that can give you opportunity funnel and give you time back in the research phase and give you the dialing information.

Great point. Thomas, do you want to add anything to that? Yeah, just in terms of the, the, the time that reps are spending research, because it is a big part of where Triggr fits into the whole picture. We’re constantly trying to surface the intelligence that’s relevant. It’s not at the incompetence of the rep that they’re spending so much time researching.

I would say that many times it is the scenario that they’re, they’re afraid to actually make the call. So it’s becoming a bit of an excuse, but the other reason is, yeah. The expectations of the buyer are much higher now. And the rep knows that they need to actually have some insight or some something that they can hook relevance to when they’re reaching out.

And that is a reality. So,it’s a combination of both the fact that. Researching feels safe. And so they’re not picking up the phone, they’re doing what they need to do. They do have to have that research done though. They have to have that insight. So that’s, that’s really where we’re triggered, fits into that picture.

It’s the research is done for you. That way there’s a bit more self-accountability for the rep. They know exactly what they need to say. When the reaching out, I have to agree.  point responding quickly to leads. You’ve got to respond in a timely manner or by they die bad. And yes, there’s plenty of lates out there.

We usually, as my organization, one of the biggest things that we do is we take old leads at the BDR stone call and we call for the rubbish, the student inquiries, and we find the gold nuggets because the BDRs are starting to have times call them. The reality is. They’re all gold nuggets, Sarah. And, regardless of whether someone thinks a lead is not strong or the leads are weak or whatever it may be, you’ve got to spend the time calling for that, for those leads.

And yeah, we can automate that process to make, to have better quality leads. And, and to, to your point, Thomas, their sales reps, I think more sales reps are becoming increasingly more scared to make calls as well. Right. So I know it’s very. Very interesting. We’ve got some questions coming in. So,  the results of the poll will go through shortly.

Peter, you made a very good point here. The hardest part of sales cycle today is no longer to close a deal, but to gain traction and engagement with the right prospects in the first place, but historical, or I guess put another way while it’s easy. It is now easy to reach your ideal customers. It has become very difficult to draw that into a meaning meaningful sales conversation.

I have to agree with you 100%, that is becoming increasingly challenging. Really agree with that point. And, we have, another note, once you have a meeting and the CEO says, leave it with us.  What is the ethical time to leave them to think on it? we all receive that. Oh, we’ll, we’ll come back to you.

Leave it with us or can we schedule an appointment? Can we, can we do a follow up? Oh, we’ll come back to you with a w with a call. I think that comes down to qualification at the very beginning, in my opinion, Thomas styling. What are your thoughts? with that doubt, opening is the most difficult.

And the most important phase of selling the grid. Most people that say they have a problem with closing, they don’t really have a problem with closing, never problem with opening and creating good progression. If you don’t anchor the commercial value in essence, the business case for change, right. You’ll be dealing endlessly with people who have interests that never converts in them actually driving change or purchasing.

So the way we open around the commercial value of change, how this leader can drive improved results for the organization and for them in their role, if you’re not solving a serious problem, I helping them realize a significant opportunity. There’s not going to be much money. They’ll just lose the Twain because at the end of the day, When a mid-level person pushes up to their manager, a request to do something, the manager goes, do you know what?

I’ve got 17 things on my desk. We’ve only got limited time and resources in the organization. We can’t do them all. Why should this be a priority? And if the seller doesn’t help their own person, or they don’t have clarity themselves and had to do that, then they’re in trouble right out of the gate. The other reason that the opening phases so difficult is none of the people were seeking to get.

That do not yet know us. None of them are lonely and bored and looking for another friend in business. None of them want a seller in their life. Like they just don’t, but they typically want more value from fuel suppliers. So, so that’s we, and we need to create progression, right? If a CEO saying, leave it with me.

Well, that’s not progress. So we need to say to them, Hey, what would you like us to do together to progress this? What would you like us to do together to progress this? But who else do I need to meet within your team? What other data do you need? What are you going to put in a business case for the board?

I’m just conscious of getting close on time, too. So. No, that’s great. Tiny re really appreciate your insights. I’ve got a question coming up. I thought that was quite funny. Your wall clock has not lose since the start. Well, I mean, I’m in, I’m in a frozen timely, diver guilt. We’re always thinking the same thing, David.

Yeah. I mean, I’m going to tell him like it’ll, it’ll I’m sure it’ll come off the second. Is finished great stuff. I’ve looked within the interest of time. Tony let’s let’s, let’s wrap up, really appreciate your time. Tony and Thomas, really happy to have you on the show, stay super, super happy. Just before we wrap up, I’m going to share the slides again.

There’s a couple of things I wanna cover this while you’re doing that. Yeah. I just encourage people to get tech powered sales, the new book. There’s a whole section in there that explains the whole trigger event thing and how to make it work for you. All of the tech stack and the things you can do.

Thanks, Matt.  I, agree with Tony. I’ve started reading the book on that halfway through, and I’ll have to admit it’s, one of the best books I’ve ever read so far, so yeah, highly recommend you get it as well. Stuff.  Look just to wrap up, ‘ll be again, I’ll be reaching out to you individually for a free copy of my book just for the 21st attendees.

So I’ll reach out to you shortly on that. Look, I, I guess, for the last couple of minutes, if there’s any questions, anyone wants to add throw them away, but if you want to. Reach out to any of us today. Place email addresses here, myself, Matthew cam, prospecting.com, tmoin@triggr.ai or tony@rsvpselling.com for anything trigger related.

I’ve reached out to Thomas. He’s an absolute expert in that field and also Tony as well. It’s a great tool. I’d highly recommend everyone to use it.  So to wrap up the session again. Thank you so much, Tony. Thank you so much, Thomas. Really appreciate you guys. Having you guys see a very insightful discussion today, learned a lot, and I hope the audience feel the same way and there will be a recording of this session.

So I will pass it over to everyone at the end of this as well. Yeah, I love this session. It was a great time. Thanks Matt. No worries. Thanks everyone. Thanks Tony. Thanks Tom.