Master Class in B2B SaaS: Sales and Marketing Automation Tactics

– Hey everybody. Welcome to our Webinar for today, our topic is Master Class in B3B SaaS, Super Slick Sales and Marketing Automation Tactics. I’m really excited to be presenting this information here for you today. Here at WebMechanix, we’re a digital marketing agency, we have a ton of B2B Saas clients, I personally have been a SaaS marketer for a pretty long time, before I came to join webmechanix. So, this is kind of a, I hate this term, but it’s unavoidable, this is sort of a brain dump of everything I’ve learned over the years. I’m just really really excited to be able to share this with you folks today.- In a very consolidated way, I’ll add. It’s not a brain demo of everything you know, but its, this is the high-level stuff that, you know, if you’re a B2B SaaS marketer you should, this is what you should be thinking about.

– 100 percent, yeah. So let’s jump in. First of all, hello and welcome, obviously. My name is Clare French, I’ll be presenting today. Head of Growth here at WebMechanix, I know I told you a little bit about my background, I’ll just add that I’m highly passionate about marketing technology, more tech and just you know, automation in general, I really love this stuff. Live and breathe it, have for a long time. I’m joined today by Arsham Mirshah. Arsham, he’ll be moderating, I’ll let you introduce yourself.

– Yep, so happy to be here as well. I’m co-founder here at WebMechanix. I’ve been on the leading edge of marketing technology for over ten years now and watching it change, evolve, grow, iterate and it’s so exciting, it’s so cool what you can do nowadays. I love it because we’re enabling marketing to move faster, be more agile and we’re enabling also the sales teams to follow up with the best leads and not waste their time with other ones and then helping all that report up to the senior and exec and even board level. This is so fun, at WebMechanix I’m co-founder so I’m kinda the glue that binds our different teams together. The creative, the development, the administrative, the marketing teams right? So here to join Clare, Clare and I work closely together and she does not give herself enough credit. She’s worked at fortune 100 companies down to startups to fast growth and has seen a lot, has seen it all maybe.

– I’ve seen a lot, let’s put it that way.

– Let’s get into it.

– All right, so presentation roadmap, what we’ll be talking about today. So we’ll talk a little bit about the flywheel model of acquisition and retention. We’ll talk about why integrating your product data with your marketing data is like revenue glue. Separate from the glue that Arsham is.

– True.

– And kinda also similar. We’ll talk through three must-have nurture campaign types and we’ll talk about sales and marketing alignment i.e. four sales enablement ideas. That you can implement actually very quickly. So the focus of this today will be on actual advice and guidance for you to go and take back to your companies immediately. And then the last thing that we’ll talk about as we wrap up is one very cool integration that I’m excited to share with you. I know I’m saying excited a lot, it’s because I’m just a really excited person and this stuff I’m super, super passionate about. So I wanna talk quickly about this flywheel model and you may have seen this, HubSpot has been talking a lot about this lately. Full disclosure, we’re diamond-certified HubSpot partners. A lot of the things that we’ll be showing you today we are using HubSpot to do. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to use HubSpot, we like HubSpot. Anyhow this is a flywheel model. So this kind of compares and contrasts with the funnel model which is kind of old and a little bit linear, right? You have marketing coming in with leads and then they’re passing those leads off to sales. Sales is hopefully converting those folks into customers. And then you know, what happens once they’re customers? Well, the flywheel model kind of comes in and puts the customers really at the center of your business and positions service and marketing and sales teams around your customers. I also would add to this and this is very specific for SaaS companies in particular and really any kind of software company. Is that your product team also should be really focused on your customers too. They should be talking to your customers and doing focus groups and thing like that.

– And marketing service can help aid that.

– 100%, yeah.

– And the technology, you can sit in the middle of that to help aid all that as well.

– Yeah, I totally agree. I’ll share with you very briefly, I’ll share an example and also share my litmus test. I’ll start off with the example. So the example is actually something that we’re doing very timely here at WebMechanix. We realize that we had this very intricate sales process where we’re asking prospects a ton of questions about their business and how they market and what they’re doing today and what they’d like to be doing tomorrow. Well that’s great during the sales process, but once our clients are coming in to the services team, we noticed that we were kind of asking them some redundant questions. It’s not really a great user experience frankly. So we’re starting to introduce another person, another point of contact that comes in at the sales process and kind of sticks on with the client through the on-boarding process as well. So that person is really there to kind of make a more cohesive experience where we have less redundancy and a more efficient process for the client. So it’s a good example of you know, kind of sales and service working together really with a customer in mind.

– Big time.

– And then my litmus test is imagine within your company you have a customer that’s happy, you have a customer that’s unhappy. Whatever, whichever the case is. If your marketing team can call that customer up and say hey, how are things going and if they’re happy or they’re unhappy and particularly if they’re unhappy. If they can own the fix, right? If they can from point to point say okay, I see that this customer is unhappy, services you please do this, product here’s some things for you to think about, and oh by the way sales, you know if we make this client happy then potentially there’s an upsale opportunity in three months, or six months or whatever. So if your marketing team can call your folks up and get that information and own the fix, you’re probably in good shape. Now that doesn’t mean that you have to, it doesn’t necessarily make sense for your marketing team to call your customers, users, clients, whatever you wanna call them up. But if you can, I would say you probably have a pretty good flywheel. So one thing that we definitely wanna cover today which is talking through how your product data and marketing data when used together create like what I call revenue glue or like a state of zen, right? So you have all this really rich data about your users within your product and you really wanna share that data with your marketing side. So the marketing can send stuff to those folks and let them know about new features or let them know perhaps about product features that they’re not using yet but they could, they could benefit from. A really good, straight-forward example that I like to use is with Gmail, with Google. So a lot of folks use g-mail even if it’s just Gsuite at work or personally Gmail’s obviously in very high adoption. Now let’s say that there’s a feature called filters, right? You can set up a filter to put all your receipts into a folder or something like that. Let’s say that I’m not using filters. The Google product team knows that because they can go and look and see that you know, my e-mail account has never set up filters. But if they’re not letting the marketing team know that then the marketing team can’t send me e-mails being like hey Clare, why don’t you use some filters. It would change your life.

– Let us show you how in a video, right, yeah.

– Right, exactly. So again, really combine that product data with your marketing data, revenue glue. It just makes everything sticky and makes adoption stickier, it’s likely to drive more money, more monthly recurring revenue, annually recurring revenue, all that sort of stuff. Very very good stuff.

– And I say oh, some of this stuff is not possible without this integration of the product and the marketing automation path-lane. So that’s why this is very important, you know you have to have them integrated. Google would have to tell you that they would have to put a flag in that like, has this user used filters or not? Right, or something like that.

– Right. All right, good so moving on. A couple very quick, I promise, few other thoughts. So one, with automation, you can have your cake and have robots feed it to you. I came across this a year or two ago and I just loved it and I’ve been saying it ever since. Every time I give a talk about automation I just love this quote because it really sums up the value from it. Also, according to ANNUITAS, nurtured leads spend 47% more so e-mail is always, always, always worth the time. And by the way, a lot of what we’re gonna be talking through here is e-mail one way or another. Whether it’s through the notifications tool where you can focus on things or through communicating with leads and users, customers. A lot of what we’ll be talking through is e-mail. Also, and this is according to Bain & Company, obviously a well-respected management consultancy. A 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25-95% gain in profits. That’s a lot of money, obviously.

– Huge.

– It’s a pretty well published statistic so you may have heard that before but again I just wanna kinda position the value here and not only with your leads but also with your customers and proving retention and things like that. So we’ll jump into lifecycle nurture campaign types and I’m excited because again we’ll be talking about this not only with leads, but also with customers. And I think a lot of companies focus very heavily on marketing to leads but there’s another part of marketing that’s marketing for retention. So we’ll be talking through each campaign type from the standpoint of both leads and customers. So consideration, onboarding, re-engagement, let’s jump in and define them. So with consideration with regards to leads, you’re essentially re-targeting your leads who have not yet converted into a sale. And there are lots of ways to re-target, you know. There’s lots of advertising mechanisms, things like that. When I say re-target in this context I mean specifically with e-mail but I think that a lot of these ideas kind of apply to both worlds, right? So speaking of ideas, you might have next steps, you might have valuable content like a thought leadership piece or an e-book or something along those lines that you wanna offer your leads. And then another really kind of high value thing is book a sales meeting call-to-action. So if you’re a B2B, you’re most likely having one sales person that talks to various leads within a company so book a sales meeting is a huge thing for consideration. For customers the goal is gonna be to deepen the customer relationship with the product or a company while also increasing that lifetime customer value or LCB which is obviously something that kinda all of us are talking about a lot. Ideas here includes things like cross-sells and upsells. Again, you may not necessarily think about consideration campaign for your customers but really once a customer buys your product, then they’re kind of automatically back in the consideration phase, right? Like they maybe haven’t thought about features that they could be using or there’s some other product within your suite of tools that they could be using or something along those lines. So cross-sells and upsells are big here. Also referral requests and testimonials. Why, because if you’re reminding folks that they are happy with your product and that they like you and like saying nice things about you, there’s like a subtle psychological factor there where they wanna buy more stuff from you. So definitely things to think about. Onboarding campaigns. So an onboarding campaign typically is like a multi-part e-mail series that is introducing either leads or customers to your product so with regard to leads, we’re really welcoming those free trial leads into the fold and introducing them to the product. Ideas here might include things like top features or how to’s or to do’s. Points of contact and just generally anything to engage those folks with almost always a good idea. Points of contact might be things like hey, here’s your sales point of contact, contact this person if you need support or this team or whatever. Which is really letting leads know that they are not alone. Really really important. Similarly for customers, the goal is really to focus on whatever the most important next action to take within the sales cycle is, right? So they’ve bought your product, I think no SaaS company on earth would disagree with the idea that pretty immediate adaption is the key to retention. So onboarding for customers is super, super important and ideas can include things like account setup. Again with points of contact this might be if you have an account management structure, this is a really great tab to introducing that account management. Or even just app-specific things. Here’s a feature that you might really like that other companies like you are using. Or here’s some aspect of our product. These are the top 5 things that people do first with the thing that you’ve bought. That kind of stuff.

– Couldn’t this also be, Clare, like the quintessential example here is verify your e-mail address, right? So that’s the quintessential easy example. There’s also integrate your first integration or whatever. Whatever it is for your product that means that they’re engaging with it.

– And yeah, I think that every product kind of has whatever it’s most standard thing is, right? Going back to Gmail because again it’s ubiquitous, everyone uses it. Maybe if Gmail notices that you haven’t sent an e-mail yet, they’re gonna poke you and be like hey, send an e-mail, don’t forget about us, you created this e-mail address, you should use it. You know, that kinda stuff. I think it’s probably specific for every company but at the same time there are a few standards that apply to many companies.

– We’re not saying that only do this via e-mail. ‘Cause you’re gonna have to in-app flow as well and that’s important of course, you wanna get them right when they’re already in the app.

– But if they’re not already in the app, it’s a way to get them.

– But if they’re not already in the app for whatever reason, it’s a way to get them there, yeah. I’ve seen one invite, another thing on here is like invite your friends, like with Slack for example. It’s like hey, Slack is not cool by yourself so invite your team. So that’s part of their onboarding. Yeah, word of thought.

– Yeah, invite others, friends, colleagues, whatever.

– Yeah.

– All right, so re-engagement. Re-engagement is something that frankly, and I mean I’ve seen this a lot in my marketing career like I think a lot of people kind of plays a re-engagement, re-engagement is actually a really great kind of campaign to have. For leads, the goal is really to ask dormant leads to come back and check you out again or just to promote valuable content. Kind of anything just to get them to click through and re-engage with your brand. Ideas here include valuable content again, e-books, case studies, thought leadership pieces of any sort, even if it’s from somebody else. It can be really valuable here. Also offers, offers are huge for any type of app or software company. If you have a lead that became a lead 30 days ago and hasn’t bought yet, maybe you wanna give them a 10% discount or something like that. Then also just a simple hey, we’re checking in to see how things are going, we haven’t heard from you for a little while. How’s everything coming along? That kind of thing. And then with customers and I know this is a can of worms. There are kind of two schools of thought here, right? One says don’t go poking a sleeping bear with customers that are dormant or aren’t engaging with your product and I actually, to that I respond in general, it’s different for every company. To that I respond actually, you have a lot of opportunity here. If you have customers that are dormant, it means that probably they’re going to stop paying you soon anyway if you don’t act, but if you’re proactive with them and you sort of say hey, you know, we noticed that you haven’t been using the product, is everything okay? They might come back and say, and I’ve had this happen, they come back and say actually, we’ve had a ton of turnover, I’m really glad that you’re reaching out because I haven’t even had time to think about it, can you please help? And it’s an opportunity to sell services or hook them up with some other sort of resource. Maybe there’s some contract negotiations that can be made that are beneficial to everybody, whatever. It’s actually not a bad idea to reach out to dormant customers.

– Yeah.

– So ideas here include again valuable content, can’t stress that enough. Content, content, content. Account manager outreach, this is super important and it’s nice for folks to know that there’s some person on the other end of the machine thinking about them and also new feature updates. Sometimes folks stop using their product because they’re not deriving enough value out of it and so if you have new product features that’s always really important to let folks know so that they can begin deriving value out of it again. All right, so I’m gonna take a brief pause here. I’ve seen a bunch of questions coming in, I know you’re kinda..

– I got the questions, I got the questions, yeah. So some are specific, some higher level ones so let’s try, I’m gonna, okay. Here’s a good one. Stephanie asks, “what information do SaaS companies have from their product that they should pipe into their marketing automation”.

– So this is actually a really good, and forgive me because I probably should have said this kinda right at the outset, right. There are specific data points, again it’s gonna be different for each company you have. Stephanie, I don’t know what kind of company you’re running over there but I know a recent example for us is like we work for an e-mail service provider, right? It’s a client of ours. They have all this information about provisioning accounts. So we’ve brought that information into their marketing automation platform where you can do things like understand who’s sent their first e-mail yet and who hasn’t. And if they haven’t sent their first e-mail yet guess what, they’re going to get an e-mail from our client saying hey, why don’t you send your first e-mail? That kind of thing. As you’re planning that out, if you haven’t taken the step to integrate your product data with your marketing data yet, definitely think about those kind of key..

– Pivotal moments.

– Pivotal points, yeah. Where your users are, maybe where they’re getting hung up but also just where there’s opportunity in general for again, cross-sells, upsells and too like, analyze your product data. If you notice that getting back to the first e-mail example if you notice that folks who take a month to send their first e-mail cancel after six months but people who send their first e-mail within two weeks or two days or whatever..

– Stay for a long time.

– That’s huge, that shows you very clearly with data where to focus your efforts and where to focus your marketing efforts. Good question.

– It is a good question, yeah. I mean I would also add to that things like their log-ins, when people are logging in, send that data.

– Like an auto-trail of logins?

– Yeah, an auto-trail of logins because then you can do work flows of like, show me customers who haven’t logged in in the last week, or last month, or last whatever, right? And that’s easy to do, little lists like that, right?

– Or like free trial leads. Show me free trial leads who didn’t convert to sales.

– Fantastic, that’s a good one.

– You wanna send those folks an e-mail.

– Or few them off up for your sales team. I know that’s coming next.

– Yeah, it is but you know another really good kind of automated nurture campaign to run is, and this kind of falls into re-engagement too is hey, we noticed that you trialed our product, we haven’t seen you back or you didn’t buy it, can you tell us why you didn’t buy, or maybe you just need some more time. If you want more time, hey, we’ll re-up your trial for another 7 days or 30 days.

– That’s a good one Clare, that’s a good one. Hey, yeah, we’ll let you keep trying for another 7 or whatever number of days. And that way it gets them engaged with you. Yeah, yeah, I do wanna do that, yeah, yeah, sounds good.

– It also positions you as an empathic company, right?

– That’s true, that’s true.

– It’s like you’re giving, and it’s the law of reciprocity.

– Reciprocity, yeah.

– You’re giving something and hopefully in exchange you’ll get something in return.

– Yeah, that’s right.

– So sometimes it may impact your bottom line incrementally but it can certainly be a way to get more sales in the door which impacts your bottom line, well.

– John says he has robots feeding him already.

– Good, good on you John.

– Good job John, you’re having a good time.

– Maybe we can talk later.

– All right, here’s another question. Parash, I hope I’m pronouncing that right. You named three campaign types, consideration, onboarding and re-engagement, what’s the best place to start Clare?

– Oh, that’s a really good question. Actually, I’m really glad that Parash, wherever you are, brilliant thank you for bringing that one up. I would start out with onboarding and here’s why. So onboarding is like where the rubber meets the road, right? It’s the first really meaningful contact that a new lead who has gone far enough to trial your product or even better a customer, who has gone far enough to buy your product, that’s really where they’re kind of meeting you. It’s a great time to really build your brand equity, build brand awareness and just generally be warm and welcoming, who doesn’t love a warm welcome? So if you’re early stage start-up or if you just haven’t built this stuff out yet or if you have something you built up, you’re not sure if it’s the right stuff. If you’re trying to figure out where to start, onboarding is brilliant.

– It’s a great place to start, I completely agree with that. Yeah, I mean if you already feel like you have that flow down I would probably go to consideration next to get you know, more leads in the door and get them kind of happier or whatever, right? Or get them successful from the start, so that you don’t ever have to do re-engagement, right? The goal is we don’t have to do re-engagement because everyone’s good.

– It’s the goal, but you should always be doing it.

– I know, I know.

– It’s funny because I’m sure, I said I’m a marketer right, you’re a marketer like I’m sure that everybody would just expect me to sort of say consideration but I actually think where the money is, is really in onboarding.

– I completely agree with you.

– Though both are certainly valuable.

– Right.

– What else?

– Two other questions are kind of too specific, one doesn’t make sense, let’s move on.

– We’ll hold them off for the end.

– Yeah, let’s hold off to the end, we’ll answer all the questions. Steve says, thank you for the stats.

– Well, I love stats.

– Bain and Company, the 5% increase in customer retention can lead to 25-95% gain in profits. In profits, not in revenue folks, so profits. It makes sense ’cause you did all the work up front to get that, because I think the reason why the retention is is because of the…

– It’s cheaper.

– Well, LCD, right? One-time customer value, as that raises incrementally, it exponentially raises your profit. Just because of that, in SaaS and software world, what’s the cost of doing business, like hosting, right? That’s it, well not that’s it, but you guys know.

– Yeah, but once you’ve gone to that..

– I mean in marketing, I mean your cost of good soul is pretty much just hosting, you know. Everything else is expense, the marketing, the customer service, the product development, the R&D, and that’s below the line, so you know. All right let’s move on then.

– So moving on, the second part of our presentation is going to be a little bit different from the first. It’s gonna be more recipes and as I said, very focused on actionable advice. So let’s talk sales and marketing alignment for a few minutes, and by the way automation isn’t just for marketing. Sales folks need nurturing, too. So again, we’re gonna talk through some recipes and the first thing I’d like to talk through is lead escalation. So you have all these leads doing stuff and it’d be nice for your sales folks to know about some of that stuff. Maybe not all of it, but they’re busy, they have a lot going on, they have a lot of plates to spend, right? So let’s help them and notify them when new lead activity is happening. Things like visiting a specific page, maybe have a really high value page, maybe it’s your management team page or your pricing page if you have one, I hope you do. Any kind of very high value visits, you wanna be sure to let your sales team know about. Clicking an e-mail link. The reason why I put this in here is get back to the book a sales meeting call-to-action, right? Let’s say that somebody clicks the link but they don’t actually book a meeting. It’d be nice for your sales folks to know that, it gives them an opportunity to say hey, were you interested in a meeting? You don’t wanna sound creepy but I think there’s a way to do it without coming on too strong. Score changes, if there’s a big change in lead scoring positively or negatively, that would be important to know. If somebody re-visits the site after x number of days, let’s say it’s 30 days or 60 days or depending on how long your sales cycle is, it could be 180 days. And then this last point and this is like, you know you’re pretty savvy if you’re doing this. It requires probably some new software that you may or may not have yet, but if you’re speaking with a company, and a new contact from that company comes and visits your site, that’s good, that means that your product is being talked about. Maybe it’s being run through the approval process or something like that so that also a really high valued thing to let sales folks know about. So here is an example of what our notifications look like, you can see that we’re offering some aggregated information like the number of visits and pages views and form submissions. If somebody’s sending you a bunch of forms, they’re engaging with your contact, and some information about e-mail also what this particularly converted on, and then what link to check out the record directly in our SRM or marketing automation tool. Which like I said, we use HubSpot. So the next thing I wanna talk through is deal advancement. So as your contracts get closer and closer to getting signed, you’ll always wanna make sure to alert relevant teams and folks because as soon as your customer comes on board you wanna make sure they hit the ground running. So this is a really good opportunity to automate things. Let folks know that you have a verbal commitment or that a contract has been sent or viewed, or even better, signed. And that payment is either needed or received. So what I mean by that last point, maybe you sent off a notification e-mail to accounting to say hey, we just signed this deal, make sure that you hit them up in 30 days or whatever your account payment terms are to follow up with them to make sure that the company is getting paid. Post-sale follow up. There’s so much opportunity here to automate things both internally and externally from a process standpoint but also just from like a procedural standpoint, right? So you could set up an ongoing campaign that e-mails new customers at 30 days, 60 days, 90 days and ask them if they would like to schedule a check-in meeting with your account manager or something along those lines. A handoff to service team. We talked about our onboarding specialists early on that we’re bringing on here at WebMechanix that’s going to see that sale to close and onboarding through with new clients. There are things that you can automate as part of that. Ensuring accounting gets paid. Again it’s pretty important, right? And also customer segmentation for future communication. I think this is so, so, so important for SaaS companies and this is why. Let’s suppose, I hope it doesn’t happen but it happens to most type companies that you have some sort of outage, yeah, exactly. We’ve seen this in the landscape of a few, with actually a few pretty big products recently.

– It happens often, yeah.

– Yeah, it does. We just had a conversation in our office about Google. Google Ads has been on the plank.

– Oh right, yeah.

– So it happens to the best of us frankly. But if you’re segmenting your customers ahead of something great happening or something not so great happening then it makes it much easier to kind of communicate with them very effectively. Maybe you wanna let your administrators know about some specific feature not working or if you have a mass outage do you e-mail everybody that’s ever used your product ever? I worked for a company that sold a lot of white label software. If we had e-mailed folks to let them know about whatever was happening in our company at the moment..

– They’d be like who are you?

– None of them would have known who we were.

– Right.

– Yeah, exactly. So you know, segmenting out folks that have your product white labeled. But maybe you still wanna be sure to e-mail whatever the point of contact is, the buyer of the product to let them know because they know who you are.

– It was, hold on. It was Steph, Steph asked about what product integration to your marketing automation platform should we have. So here’s one, is the customer, maybe their plan tier, like whatever you have like pro, basic, enterprise or whatever you have. Maybe you have an outage with one, so you don’t wanna e-mail everyone right, so only those.

– Sure, like maybe your enterprise folks are on dedicated servers or something like that.

– Yeah, something like that exactly. Or another one Clare, could be the persona of the buyer. Sometimes you have three people right. You have the economic buyer, the user buyer and the technical buyer. Well if it’s something that is economical or it’s a cross-sell or a new feature or something maybe the technical person doesn’t need to know about it. Or if it’s something that is technical maybe the economic and the user buyers don’t need to know about it. So that’s why these are things you can do in terms of integrating the product to your marketing automation team to use this segment communication that way.

– 100%, yeah.

– You’re welcome Steph.

– Okay and then the fourth kind of recipe that we’re gonna talk about is activity dashboards/roll-ups. So what I mean by this is these are notification or alerts that are really intended for sales management teams, sales leaders and these are just aggregate sales activity. Maybe it’s by a team, maybe it’s by a team member, maybe it’s by a region, it really depends on how your sales team is structured and how elaborate your organization is obviously. But we’re gonna wanna keep track of things like number of calls made, e-mails sent, again, meetings booked, it’s a big deal. Contracts sent and another one that’s a really good metric actually is two-way communication established. So you’ve got a really good lead in the door, they’ve talked to you but have you established two-way communication.

– Have they e-mailed you back.

– Right, exactly, yeah. All right so here’s the really cool thing. And I’m excited about this. Again this is something that we did at WebMechanix. We implemented this I wanna say in February so a couple months ago.

– This dog is really cool.

– I like dogs, you know that.

– He was obviously skydiving earlier.

– Clearly, that’s what dogs do.

– That’s a cool dog.

– With capes.

– I don’t remember when but it was relatively new.

– Yeah it was in the last few months. Yeah, so this is an integration that we’ve done here at WebMechanix. I’m really excited about it, basically the name of the game is Robust Slack Notifications. So we use HubSpot as we’ve mentioned and then we added some middleware which is Zapier. If you don’t know Zapier it’s a piece of middleware that’ll take two disparate systems and somehow make them talk together in various ways. So we’re using Zapier to set up Slack notifications out of Hubspot. Now HubSpot does have some default side notifications but you’ll see in a moment here what we’ve set up is far more robust. Plus you get the ability to escalate real leads in real time. You are already extending the usefulness of tools that you probably have already implemented lots and lots of companies, tech companies use Slack. Then there’s the fifth thing that I would add here is that it’s a good way to loop and focus it. They may not actually be using your CRM or your marketing automation platform. They’re still within your company, they still need to know things like accounting, maybe service, something like that. It’s just a good way to kind of let them know what’s happening.

– That’s the point, and I mentioned I’m the inner department glue here at WebMechanix, right? And I can tell you that certain departments, you guys know this and the same thing in your companies, right, certain departments use certain software and they don’t use other software, right? So your accounting team may not be in your CRM unless you have an ERP. Or your service team might use a completely different software than your sales team using the CRM or what have you. So this integration that we’re going to show you was done because sales management, not sales management but like me personally. I’m not sales management but I’m a co-founder so I wanna know what’s going on with sales right? So this is built somewhat for me and somewhat for our services team to make sure that we’re all kind of in the loop even though we’re not in a CRM on a daily basis like our sales people are, like our sales manager in our EDR. So this is an inner department community, you said it already, yeah.

– Yeah. Without further ado.

– Onward.

– So this is what it looks like and apologies, I know that this is kind of a messy little screenshot here. This is what it looks like on the Zapier side and this is what the setup is, you can see that we’re bringing in things like name and e-mail but we’re also bringing in our own custom deals which is a big benefit over our HubSpot’s out of the box native integration. So you see like visited service/contact page, that’s a custom field that we’ve set up and you know, we’re linking out to the HubSpot record and here’s what it looks like in real life, obviously we’ve kind of redacted the details to protect the privacy of our leads but you get the point here. We have all this really rich data coming in in real time. This happens I think about 5 minutes after a new lead is created so it’s good for speaking to the lead. We get that rich lead data, and then we also have real time escalation near real time. So you know you can have your sales manager saying hey, this would be a really great lead for you such and such, or just make sure that you’re getting to this. Or stop everything that you’re doing, we’ve been trying to get this company’s attention for the last 6 months and here they are. Please somebody go call them right now, don’t care who.

– Even if it’s like your sales manager is in the CRM all day if you’re using HubSpot or Salesforce, the way to get this particular thing that comes to Slack is when it’s a highly qualified lead. Like it’s in a certain industry, it’s got a certain number of employees and revenue and so we wanna know about it, right, we wanna go after those and prioritize those. Escalate those. So even though we are, Chris, myself, we are in the CRM or even a sales manager is in the CRM, you’re not necessarily always looking at the right custom view or filtered view in Salesforce for example that will show you your highly qualified leads. You might be somewhere else in the system. So what we did is we know Slack blows us up, gives us notifications so we said okay, we want notifications for this and this only. We may not be in that particular list in our CRM at all times but we will get notified when this happens and we’ll be on it and speak to leads ’cause every second that goes by your chance of reaching that lead exponentially drops. So that’s what this is and we’ve done it for other companies as well because they know the power to speak to leads and they know the power of lead score.

– Yeah, 100%.

– So that’s what this is and mmm, SaaS, yummy.

– All right, so that concludes our presentation. I’m sure we have some questions.

– I got questions, I got questions, yeah.

– I got answers, I’m sure you’ve got answers too.

– Yeah, I’m just trying to copy and paste some here, okay. Okay so here’s a new one. Kim asks, “I saw you had info coming in, new leads like industry, are you asking for that on your forms?”. Kim says.

– Okay, that must’ve been on the last slide.

– Yeah.

– Yeah, okay. Oh, that’s a really good question, I’m glad that she asked that. So that’s like a sneaky little thing that we’re doing at HubSpot actually. So I won’t get into the details, if you search Hubspot on WebMechanix.com I think that we’ve released the blog post about this. But it’s this cool little sneaky thing that we’re doing where we’re taking the domain of the e-mail address of the new lead or contact and we’re taking that domain and we’re referencing it against HubSpot’s, they keep like a master database of this company data. And so they give us this company enriched data, and industry is one of the fields that they give us. We’re also taking..

– Employee size.

– Employee size, revenue, location, city/state, and so we’re bringing those down to the contact level. So that’s where you got that information from, I would never ask industry on form. I mean, I shouldn’t say never, never say never, right?

– No, look, in B2B you don’t need to anymore.

– Yeah, there’s so much opportunity for our management. Speaking of sales enablement, this is a really great sales enablement tactic too.

– Yeah, I mean if you’re still asking for things like how many employees are you and an industry and location on your forms, you don’t need to. All you need is their e-mail address, just as long as it’s not one of those free domains like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, whatever. If it’s their company domain and their company is known, they’re a decent sized company, you know 25 or more and they’ve been around for a little bit in time. Then you know, HubSpot insights will enrich that data for you and give you all that information. Clearbit will do it, ReachForce, Datanyze. I think Zoominfo bought Datanyze recently, but anyway. There are these products out there that’ll do it so you can dramatically up your conversion rate and for very inexpensive enrich that data.

– Even if you’re not trying to increase your conversion rate, which I mean let’s face it, who’s not trying to increase their conversion rate? But even if you’re not trying to, even if you just want more robust data on your database, enrichment’s a great way to do that. It can be something that’s small but powerful, it’s easy to overlook but doing this for us has made a big difference I mean we stopped accepting free e-mail addresses on all our forms. That’s a decision that I made, frankly. So if you’re trying to use a free e-mail address to download and copy this webinar you’re not getting through, my bad.

– No really, use your domain so we can enrich our data.

– Yeah but I mean that said, it’s really been a powerful impact for our business and all of the right metrics have grown in all the right ways since we made that change.

– I got questions, I got questions.

– I know, I get excited about data.

– Stephanie’s back, I like her so, David, John, I’m coming. You talked about sales and marketing alignment with tools, What’s your best advice for aligning these teams in real life.

– Oh, oh, goodness. That’s a wow, yeah. We have some really smart close of the day, yeah, I love that.

– Take them rock-climbing.

– And yeah, we lived in a rock-climbing gym. So that’s a cultural question right? And certainly you can do some team building activities there’s no better way to connect the sales and marketing teams than getting outside the office and doing. Maybe it’s a happy hour, or maybe you go rock-climbing. Whatever makes the most sense and fits.

– Yeah, but that’s not the right answer.

– But, it’s, in my view sales and marketing really has to start at the leadership level. So if you have leaders of those teams that are not in very close communication with each other you really won’t be able to achieve alignment, that’s just a fact.

– It starts at the top, just like culture.

– Yeah, exactly but I mean that’s a cultural thing too. If your individual marketing managers and your regional sales directors if they’re seeing that their leadership is getting along and talking to each other then they’ll follow suit.

– Yeah, that’s what you’re saying.

– I mean yeah, culturally, it’s really just about getting that conversation going, right? Sales and marketing kind of historically can have a tenuous relationship. You know marketing has to be empathic to the needs of sales and remember that sales is the customer of marketing.

– Say that again. Sales is the customer of marketing.

– So marketing serves sales.

– It’s there to serve sales.

– Right, okay yeah. Put that on the quote.

– That said though the sales team have to also have to be sensitive to the time of marketing and things like that.

– So leadership starts at the top, cultural would be the answer and I’d also throw this at you. You know from some of the engagements you’ve done. Have sales and marketing leadership work together to create an SLA, a service level agreement, right? So them working together to say hey, here is what we consider to be a good lead, here’s what we consider to be a marketing qualified lead, here’s a sales qualified lead, here are the firmographics, here are the demographics, the cycle graphics. Here’s what we DQ.

– Here’s what we don’t ever want.

– Right, here’s what we don’t ever want. Here are frequently asked questions. These are the components of a sales and marketing SLA or service level agreement, that’s just the term we use. A sales and marketing alignment tool is like a document that outlines these things.

– Well it’s a service level agreement, just like tech companies have with their customers.

– That’s fine, yeah.

– You know, you’re agreeing to uptime.

– It’s like between department.

– Right, exactly, yeah. But that kind of codifies what I just said, right? Marketing has a commitment to sales, but sales also has a commitment to marketing. You can’t properly serve another team unless you’re very, very well aware of their needs and they’re sensitive to your time and things like that.

– Two more questions, sorry.

– It’s okay.

– What do you mean by score changes, David says.

– So score changes relates to lead scoring. So lead scoring is basically like we use just the default lead scoring mechanism in HubSpot. You certainly can set up a lead scoring model if you want to, if you need to. My view is that machine learning and AI has gotten pretty smart, so unless you have a very sophisticated empire, maybe lead scoring, setting up a custom lead scoring model might not be the right decision for you. What’d you say?

– Empire.

– Empire. That said, generally speaking you might have a lead score threshold that you wanna make sure that your sales team follows up with so basically every time a lead engages in a new way, and does new activity. Every time they open an e-mail or opens a page.

– Click on a link in an e-mail or a certain page like a pricing page to take up that score.

– But consequently if a lead unsubscribes for example you can set a rule to say you know what, take their score down to zero because they’ve unsubscribed. They don’t wanna hear from us, they’re probably not a good lead. That kind of thing.

– One more, John here is saying what about integrating product data with sales data, what opportunities do you see in that regard?

– Oh, so actually that’s a good question. So you mentioned earlier plan tier, right. So you might have enterprise or like a basic plan or you know, something in the middle like most SaaS companies have three tiers, right. Let’s say that you have product usage data, actually here’s a great example. And we’ll go back to e-mail because again, ubiquitous. I like the easy example. Let’s say you have made an e-mail product and you have customers that are sending 9700 emails a month. And your next plan price increases at 10000 emails a month. So like a really good marriage of product data and sales data is getting your sales folks to call those people up or e-mail them or whatever and say hey, you’re really close to the next tier. Here are the benefits that are associated with that tier, how can I help, if we have custom pricing options or whatever, you know.

– Yeah, I think you’d really like this feature so let me turn it on for you for free.

– Yeah, exactly.

– Or even just letting them know, like I got an e-mail from one of our SaaS vendors, they’re like yo, your contract renewal’s coming up next month. So they obviously have a 30 day before the contract expires, you know.

– let me e-mail these folks, let me know.

– Yeah, it was automated I could tell but it came from my account manager and it was a template e-mail ’cause you could see your thing and it was like insert token here for your contract renewal.

– That’s okay though, it gets the job done.

– No that’s okay, that’s fine with me, I replied to it and now we’re in a conversation, it was great. And we’re gonna renew it and I’m like hey, we’re not using all the features I know. She’s like yeah, yeah okay I’ll help you so it’s good. So yeah, don’t waste the opportunities, it’s to help people. It kind of goes back to you re-engagement and even consideration for the customer.

– 100%, I think that you’re in the consideration phase. They know that you’re yearly contracts up or whatever and you’re considering whether or not you want to keep it. So it gets back to reaching out to your dormant customers and in this case if it’s the vendor I’m thinking of we’re not dormant at all, far from it.

– Right, exactly, sure. But it’s still like notifications to get the conversation started. This is more of an enterprise class, I mean it’s not like a $20 a month or $100 a month thing, it’s 4, almost 5 figures a month so yeah, I mean of course they wanna engage us, makes sense?

– Yeah, yeah.

– Cool, that’s all we have. The other ones..

– Are too specific?

– Yeah. One of the answers real quick, HubSpot insights yes, it’s like Clearbit, it takes a domain and enriches it for you. It comes with the HubSpot CRM so yes, that is HubSpot insights it’s like Clearbit in that sense. So yes, if you have HubSpot and you’re a B2B you might not need Clearbit. You might need Clearbit for the personal, to enrich the person, the contact level data and HubSpot does not do that, no. So there’s the answer to that specific question.

– Yeah, so we’ve done some testing with Clearbit. It’s not a bad product, it does good things.

– It’s really good, it’s great, it’s just..

– It can be a little redundant. I forget who you said that was but..

– It was John again.

– You see our e-mail contact information on the screen John, go ahead and shoot one of us an e-mail. I will happily tell you all of my thoughts about Clearbit versus HubSpot.

– Yeah.

– So on that note, let’s go ahead and close it out for the rest of the folks. Please feel free to contact Arsham or myself, we really enjoyed having you today. Like I said, I love talking through this stuff if you couldn’t tell. It’s my passion, bread and butter, love it so please don’t be shy and reach out for us if you’d like to.

– It’s fun, thank you all. Thank you for joining us today and hope this was helpful. Let us know one way or another.

– Yup, take care and like I said, we’ll answer the rest of the very specific questions at this point. So if you still asked one, stay online, we got you.

– Cheers.