On Demand: How To Do More With Less Of A Sales Team

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Connor Jeffers:
That's at two o'clock, Central. Two Central, [inaudible 00:00:07] Pacific, Ken's got to eat lunch.

Kaitlynn:
Okay. We're at about five after and by about, I mean we're at five after, so we can get started. Thanks everybody for joining. We appreciate you coming. I just wanted to introduce myself really quickly. My name is Kaitlynn, I head up the sales and enablement practice at Aptitude 8. We're here to discuss the topic, How to do more with less of a Sales team, and with that I'm excited to introduce CEO and founder Connor Jeffers and Outreach SDR manager, Ken Aman. And with that I'll pass it over to you, Connor.

Connor Jeffers:
Cool. Thanks, Kaitlynn. I'm going to jump to the intro slide here. Nice. Cool. I'm Connor. For those of you, I see some folks that are nice in the attendee list, but for those of you who don't know I run Aptitude 8. We're a consulting firm and an Outreach implementation partner. Really, what we do is we work with customers on technology to help them with marketing, sales, and customer success. We describe ourselves as kind of a RevOps consulting firm, but for anyone unfamiliar with the term, really what we do is we help companies that are B2B build revenue engines and we bring both the strategy expertise as well as the technical expertise to help people do that. And Outreach happens to be one of our favorite platforms that we love to work with, and with that I will give it to you, Ken, to give a little bit of your background and your intro, as well.

Ken Amar:
Awesome. Hi everyone, my name is Ken Amar. I'm an SDR manager here at Outreach. I started at Outreach in 2018, I was the SDR of the year and in 2019 I was their onboarding manager so I was responsible for training, onboarding new hires and new SDRs onto our platform and most recently, I'm our SDR manager for emerging markets segment which is our S&B market segment. I lead a team of about four team leads and about 30 SDRs across our emerging segment.

Connor Jeffers:
In short, Ken really knows sales and SDRs and sales process, which is why he's here with us today. Cool. Well, let's jump into the first topic. I think a good place to start is why are sales teams having to do more with less resources? And then we'll sort of jump into what that means and tactically how it might be affecting some of your businesses and what you guys can do about it.

Ken Amar:
Awesome. I think there's two main reasons. The first one is the increase in number of tools available. So, the basic tech sack for an e-sales rep would be a CRM, a sales engagement platform that they're provided, but there's a ton of other tools available. You have call recording software like Gong, you have video prospecting platforms, tons of other lead providers and all of these tools are designed to make reps a lot more efficient.

Ken Amar:
Then, obviously, you have the big elephant in the room, COVID. COVID's impacted our business, our market segment, tremendously. It's forced us to become a leaner team, a lot more scrappier and to do more with what we have. And any sales leader will tell you, Connor, that even in times like this, with COVID and global pandemic, our goals don't actually change. They stay the same, if not get higher, and now we have less reps to achieve those goals.

Connor Jeffers:
I think the other thing that we're seeing as well, is there's higher per rep cost for teams which is burdened by a lot of the tools that Ken described as well. So, not only do you have sort of your fixed salary costs for sales reps and then sort of variable commissions, but the individual costs of having a sales rep due to the number of tools is you have to pay for a Salesforce license, you have an Outreach license, you have a Gong license, you've got Clearbits, ZoomInfo, DiscoverOrg, whatever other tools in your sales stack that you're looking at and as a result, teams are looking at this and saying, "Because it's more expensive on a per rep basis, how can we sort of manage that team size down? And also invest more in technology?"

Connor Jeffers:
The other thing that we're seeing as we work with finance leads, executive leads or CEOs is a higher and blended demand gen budgets so what's happening is we're seeing that teams are looking at not just, "Here's my sales costs and my sales budget, but what's my overall go to market budget and how much am I going to spend across sales technology, demand gen spend, marketing hires and looking at that as a total blended cost of generating new business. And as a result, everyone's kind of competing for that same budget and the number of sales team members that people are able to hire goes down, which inevitably means that our sales teams have to get more effective and more efficient because, as Ken so accurately noted, the number doesn't change despite the number of headcount that we can throw at the problem going down as well.

Ken Amar:
Awesome. So, what roles do the modern sales team have, Connor?

Connor Jeffers:
I'll let you take the first one of them.

Ken Amar:
Awesome. First one, hunters. These are SDRs, like BDRs, SCRs, MDRs, really responsible for hunting for new business, prospecting and qualifying leads.

Connor Jeffers:
And I think the second one that we're seeing a lot that everyone's really familiar with is just sellers. That's going to be AEs, account executives, in smaller organizations, really sometimes a hybrid of leadership, somebody who sort of dipping into the closing seat in addition to some of their other responsibilities. And on the leadership side, we're actually seeing a lot of CEOs of early stage organizations or VPs of sales, directors, sales managers, depending on the company size taking on this position as well. We're typically seeing demand gen be as involved in the sales team so I'm sure if you guys are on the sales side, you probably hear a lot from your demand gen leads like, "Are you calling my MQLs, where are they at? Are the moving through the process?" They're carrying a lot and contributing to that goal.

Connor Jeffers:
And then sales ops is something that even just a couple of years ago was relatively new and is now becoming more standard in a lot of organizations. And whether that's something that folks have in-house as somebody who is dedicated to optimizing and managing the sales process or they're working with an external firm to help them with that exercise. Something that we're seeing being core to that overall team. And really the sales team is expanded in its scope, despite the number of sellers decreasing, which is sort of why we think that there's a lot of opportunity for folks even with smaller teams to get better results.

Connor Jeffers:
The next is, how does this actually work in practice? I'll take the first piece of this, but assembly line sales is a concept that we use a lot A8 to kind of describe how we look at modern sales teams and modern sales process and we think that Outreach being a tool that we really like and any of the other sort of engagement tools also help execute on this and the tools in the stack which is, how do we manage the process, how do we hand things off between each one of these people and how do we make sure that we're moving in the direction that we want to go and things are getting better?.

Connor Jeffers:
Really, that starts with our leaders who are going to be, whether they're the sales leaders, whether they're executive leaders, really setting the strategy, defining that target audience and saying, "What are we going after, how are we going after it?" The sales ops piece which we sort of described as building that assembly line, but really designing the floor plan. How do all the different machines connect? What is our business process? How fast can we go? How do we prevent ourselves from dropping things? How do we make sure this whole machine is constantly working and it's producing more output as we go? And I'll give it to Ken on the demand gen and the hunters piece.

Ken Amar:
Awesome. We've got the factory floor and the demand gen, they're responsible for feeding the line. I can speak for us here at Outreach, we have a fantastic demand gen team that's producing a lot of content, webinars and white papers specifically for that target audience. They're feeding atop a funnel, they pass these leads over to the hunters who actually process these items. They're responsible for qualifying the leads, adding value and then passing these qualified leads and [inaudible 00:08:23] over to the sellers.

Connor Jeffers:
When we get to sellers, really, and for some smaller organizations this could be leadership. The VP of sales could jump onto big deals, but really what we see is the majority of organizations having dedicated account executives and selling people. When we say, "packs boxes and puts them on the truck," really tying up that deal at the end of the day, so that once we have that warm prospect, they made it through our sales process, they've had the meetings booked and now we're really negotiating a contract and moving forward with an actual deal. Typically, we're seeing between all of these folks we really look at this, this is what the modern sales team looks like and a lot of people carve this up into individual groups, but one of the reasons we're seeing the number of reps people have at their disposal shrink is because we're seeing the number of roles in the overall headcount of that team expand to encompass more parts of the overall sales process.

Ken Amar:
Awesome. So, how do we actually get more done with less sellers?

Connor Jeffers:
I think for the first piece of this is really the marketing and sales handoff becomes the most important part. I think the area where with our customers we see the biggest drop in performance is when marketing's doing a ton of stuff to generate demand. They're running webinars, they're publishing white papers, they're creating landing pages, people are filling out the forms. But, the issue is that if those leads make it to sales, by the time they get there they may lack the right context, the time might take too long before they're able to follow up on it. They're not able to really engage with those prospects in any meaningful way and more importantly, marketing is constantly saying, "Hey, did you call these? What's happening? My speed to lead goes down." As Ken knows, I'm sure, from his team that they constantly get asked and harassed by the marketing folks, but the reality is that the marketing and sales handoff is the most important piece of this.

Connor Jeffers:
Really, where we see really tactical exercises that can improve this is to really ask yourself, "Where do my sales reps go to see the leads they should be working right now?" And, "How do I go and view those somewhere, how do I have a defined list that says this is the number one priority records that you need to be reaching out to?" and if that's in your CRM, if it's something that you can sync up to something like an Outreach and automate, manage, there's tons of value there as well. But, one of the most important questions is, how do my reps surface those?

Connor Jeffers:
Something else we really like is seeing folks use tools that allow them to leverage task priority and manage what Outreach, and Ken and his team describe as sort of a playlist of sales actions that make it really, really easy for your sales team to know exactly what they should be doing and when. The biggest reason for this is, time waste that people incur from wondering, "What should I do next?" And going hunting for the CRM for records, maybe looking through my sent emails from last week, who should I follow up with, what should I do. The more that we can eliminate that task and really take care of a lot of that thought process for our teams, that they can just focus on doing what they do best, which is having meaningful conversations with customers and really driving things forward. You want to add anything to that, Ken, you can feel free or I can jump down to the next thing.

Ken Amar:
Definitely. One thing I do want to add though, in terms of time efficiency. The beautiful thing about Outreach, our SDRs log in every day and they're able to execute all the tasks, all their calls in one go, all their emails in one go and you kind of hit it on the head, there's a lot of efficiency in time gains, executing with things in our buckets.

Connor Jeffers:
Cool. I think the second thing that we see a lot when we do a lot of CRM implementations or we audit a lot of sales processes as well with some of our private equity and venture partners, but something that we see happen a lot is, leaving contact stages being something that don't really tell us very much about what should happen next. I think anyone whose either worked with a new sales leader or hired on a new sales leader, one of their favorite things to do is immediately go and overhaul all of the opportunity stages and our lead statuses, and we think that is really important. We really think that when we look at a stage or a status, it should really inform us, what should we being doing next? And not just be a bucket to dump things into and really to inform us that if we look at records and we see which status they're in, we know exactly the next thing we need to do to move them further in the process. And tools like Outreach can do an amazing job of automating a lot of those data updates as well, furthering and minimizing some of the manual activity that our sales team does, but more importantly ensuring our data is accurate so we can constantly sort of be making updates in progress.

Connor Jeffers:
One of the other things that we really like to do with this number three item is really map out what that journey looks like. If you and your team have not sat down and actually drawn out, how do we move people through our process, what does our lead statuses look like, what are journey that people go through and how does someone become a customer of our organization? A diagram that your reps can really reference and see and know where they're at in the process goes a really long way. It's something we start all of our engagements with, whether we're designing new systems or overhauling them, but I encourage every sales or every marketing leader to really sit down and do this because one, it will help you discover maybe areas where there's gaps, there's drop offs, things take longer than they should. But also give you something that will you train and onboard new hires as well as give your existing team context on where they're at in their overall process.

Connor Jeffers:
I'm not sure if that's something that you include in some of your new hire training or anything on that end, Ken, or how you guys get people up to speed on what the sales process is, but obviously Outreach's sales process is extremely tight and you guys are giving a lot of attention to it.

Ken Amar:
Yeah, we do include a diagram of the entire customer journey.

Connor Jeffers:
Cool. I think that's super important and if Ken and his team are doing it, I'd recommend you guys do it as well. The next piece and then I'll stop talking and give Ken a turn, I promise, is managing CRM decay, which we really look at as the number of records you have in your system of who's unengaged, who hasn't come and interacted with any of the marketing materials, how do we actually re-engage those people? How do we pull them in, whether it's into our marketing automation system or do some nurturing so that our sales people are going and trying to bang down doors that nobody might be behind and really creating a process to both enrich data that you have in your system that could be years old and be outdated, it could have bad contact information. If your sales reps are, you're pounding them to either put up their activity numbers but every phone call they make is hitting a disconnected line or the person doesn't work there anymore, there's lots of ways to leverage technology to eliminate that waste and have them focus on the records that are actually qualified.

Connor Jeffers:
And also, understanding how to handle some of your contact optics, how do you make sure that when you have a conversation on the sales end, are they asking for a full marketing opt out, are you passing that back to your automation system? Or, if they're asking not to be called anymore, can we ask where, "Hey, that's totally fine, can we add you to our marketing list and continue to prospect into you," and once that person becomes re-gaged, we follow back up with them. Really ensuring that we're creating both business process and then leveraging technologies solutions to ensure that all of our CRMs are up to date, so our sales team when they're working records is confident they're accurate, correct and they're not just wasting their time, because the number one resource of the sales team is going to have is time in their day. And with that, Ken, I'll give it to you.

Ken Amar:
Awesome. So next up is really defining the users and roles. For example, SDRs, what are their rules of engagement? What is their territory, their account base? When an SDR starts at Outreach, they're given a 100 net new accounts to work and that's their book of business. As they ramp up, they usually end with about 300 or 400 total accounts and over the course of their lifetime as an SDR, they're responsible for generating new business, new pipeline on these 400 accounts and really understanding the workflows, really understanding the use cases for each of these 400 accounts in their segment and in their territory. Connor, do you want to hit it a little bit on the sales force roles and territories?

Connor Jeffers:
Something that I think Ken touched on that's really valuable, is really defining, I think with, especially if you look at ABM strategies or having SDRs target stuff. Not just saying, "Hey, you can go call anybody in the universe." I'm really saying, "Here are the accounts you need to work," is going to keep them laser focused on the things that we define as most valuable and really that sales leader's responsibility is saying, "What are those accounts? Which ones are we going after and why?" But, I think something to extend on is, leveraging Salesforce, Outreach or other technology tools to really define those territories and make sure your team knows who they can go after and who they should be going after.

Connor Jeffers:
Something we find a lot in organizations that we start working with is, if you ask them, "Hey, here are all these accounts. We want to launch an SDR program, is it okay, cool? Which accounts are they going after?" If they get a bite and they hook somebody, who are they booking the meeting for? And the more accurate your CRM data is, and really knowing who they are paired to, and something that we've seen be successful is either leveraging AE and SDR pairings and assigning SDRs specific AEs for team selling and really creating pods of people so everyone knows who they're booking with. Or something we've also seen be really successful is just having really good CRM hygiene, so even if SDRs are working across multiple territories, multiple time zones, they always know that when they are actually able to book with somebody, they're able to know who they're booking that meeting for and not spend a lot of time and also creating disruption in your prospect experience of not knowing who someone's suppose to talk to next.

Ken Amar:
And you mentioned two things, I like to expand on, Connor. One is equipping AEs with a pipeline they can execute against. For example, here in Outreach, if our new logo pipeline quota, new logo quota is 50K a month, the average AE will need 4X that in pipeline to hit their number, so an SDR needs to produce at least 200K in pipeline from their accounts to support their account executive.

Ken Amar:
You also kind of mentioned a little bit, having a really tight ICP, ideal customer profile, to execute against. Here at Outreach, we like to expand the idea of ICP to really workflows we support. The ICP for Outreach would be another high tech startup, the BDR and AE function, we know our SDR's prospect into them, the value props that they use and our AEs know how to close those deals really well.

Connor Jeffers:
Cool. I think one of the next things to really jump into is leveraging sales automation. Ken is here from Outreach, so obviously this is going to be a big topic, but I think just expanding past Outreach, something that we think is super important and we see people do is if you want your team to be more productive, leverage triggers for the repeatable actions.

Connor Jeffers:
So much of what the team does every day from when someone replies our ops out, they're checking off boxes to, someone says, "Hey, call me next week." They're now going and creating a followup task and managing all of this. By having triggers in our systems, we're able to automate a lot of those actions so that a rep simply updates a single field or checks a single box or enrolls someone in a different sequence and everything else can be dependent off of that. This is something that the sales ops role should really be owning in the organization and really focusing on, "How can I get my team to make more activities with a lower number of actions and also how can I eliminate clicks and actions from my sales team's day?" Because every time your sales team does anything that's not talking to a customer and progressing a deal, they're spending time on things that aren't a great use of their time.

Connor Jeffers:
I think another piece of that would say these don't just have to be limited to something like an Outreach, you can extend into Salesforce, you can extend into a marketing automation platform. Figure out ways and actions that your sales team spends time on and then identify ways that you can automate those actions and your return will be immeasurable.

Ken Amar:
Awesome. So, the next point, high customization on first touches, and off the shelf subsequent touches on. What we mean by this is that your allotment of time, if you put something into sequence, you want to spend the majority of your time up front, 10, 15 minutes doing extra research, writing a little bit better of an email. So all of the subsequent touches in any sequence are going to bump that research. Any of the calls that you make later on in the sequence, you can continue to reference that first email, that first high customization you did.

Connor Jeffers:
I think one of the other things that we see people have a lot of success with, and I think I inadvertently touched on a little bit earlier is automated queuing of new prospects. Really what that means is, not only here's the high value list of records that your team needs to go work, but if you leverage sales automation, something that we see people do a lot is take our inbound MQLs, which asset did they actually convert on, what was the asset value prop we were speaking to. Leveraging roles in the CRM to assign an ICP or role or persona to that record and then using your sales automation tools to then move those people into sequences geared for that audience. So that way, to Ken's point and some of the high customization first touches, the rep can just log in and be served with, "Here's a list of high customization first touches you need to manage." Write those, hit send and you can just continue to crank through them, instead of them constantly context switching, going back to the system, trying to figure out who they should be talking to next. The more you can leverage sales automation to actually dictate what your team should be doing, the more productive they're going to be able to be.

Connor Jeffers:
Extending on that as well is re-engage opt leads. If you're engaged with someone six months ago, resurfacing a task for a sales rep to go and check in with that person and see where they're at. All of our lost opportunities, one of the biggest things that we see get left on the table with organizations that are just getting started with marketing or sales automation tools is there's this huge wealth of people that we've spoken to, perhaps we've even demoed our product to, maybe we established who the buyer is and then the conversation ended, they didn't buy from us for that day and then we never talked to that person again. The more that we can leverage automated re-engagement, the more that we can make sure that we are squeezing every single ounce of juice we can out of the pipeline we have. Especially with folks whose businesses are affected by COVID, if the juice still has to be just as much and you have less to squeeze, the more we can get out, the more important and as Ken noted in the beginning, the number doesn't change. Which is always true from sales, it only goes up.

Connor Jeffers:
The last piece I think is important as well is enriching data on record create. One of the things that I even look at some of the sales activities we take on internally as an organization is, a lead comes in and the first thing that someone's going to go do is go look them up on LinkedIn. Go see what that person's doing, see what their role is, maybe look at the company and the size and how many people are there. That may only take a couple of minutes, but if you're doing that across hundreds of records a day, you're expending a tremendous amount of time on actions that can be totally automated.

Connor Jeffers:
Every record that gets created in the system, there is a wealth of technology tools that can add context, add enrichment. There's native feature in something like an Outreach where right on that contact's you can get surface information about who that person is and there's also tools you can leverage, and if you just even Google data providers, sales data providers, you'll find hundreds and obviously, the big guys in the space with Clearbit and DiscoverOrg and there are so many options to be able to enrich that information.

Connor Jeffers:
More importantly, leverage it and personalization. Not only to Ken's point, are you doing high customization on those first touches, but if you leverage sales automation, you can be adding context into all of the communication you have. Some of the projects that we've done that I've seen be remarkably successful are when we're able to connect someone's Salesforce environment into say, their software application and we can sync in information about when the last time someone logged in was. What tools and features they access and which ones they haven't and then we can use that data to surface Outreach communication to say, "Hey, Ken, I saw that you haven't logged in, in the last week or two. Most marketing people really are interested in our features that show different ABM profiles and list enrichment tools, here's a case study specific to what you have and haven't done." And leveraging that sales automation will keep your team focused on the opportunities that they can generate and less on, "How can I personalize this email or how can I add context?" And all of that can be automated to increase their time and their effectiveness.

Ken Amar:
Awesome. Tool bag. This is kind of interesting. Here at Outreach we use titles on LinkedIn, on LinkedIn Sales Nav to really drive persona driven sequences. Our SDR team, our AE team, we're reaching out to four main personas, sales leadership, sales management, marketing and revenue operations, aka sales operations. Within these four persona sequences we have a kind of high touch sequence and a low touch sequence. By high touch sequence, we mean a manual sequence. We kind of touched on this a little bit earlier. This is an email you want to put more time in up front and the low touch sequences are a lot more automated where you can kind of just plug and play.

Ken Amar:
However, there's a lot of thought leaders on LinkedIn that say, "Hey, personalize, personalize, personalize," but it's really important to equip your team with templates in these sequences. We're not saying that the whole email should be templated but you want a template because it gives you a very consistent call to action, a very consistent value prop across different personas. This is when the SDR or AE can come in and personalize on top. This allows you to scale much more efficiently over time.

Connor Jeffers:
Cool. I think one of the next pieces that extends past templates and Outreach's specific language is snippets, but other tools have resources to do this as well, which is give your team building blocks that they can compile things really quickly. The amount of time, and one of the things that we always like to do when at new audit engagements, is take all of the sales communication that your team is sending out and dump it into a tool that builds word clouds or services common phrases and you can see how often people are just rewriting the exact same things. If you give them snippets and they can sort of wire together something really, really quickly and select from multiple different options as opposed to having to rewrite it each time, again you're going to get back some rep time, but the extent of that is you can test these. You can ensure that they're on message and on brand.

Connor Jeffers:
One of the things for multiple sales leaders that I've spoken to in marketing leaders, what really gives them fear is when, "Hey, I have all these reps that are here having communication with customers. I don't know what they're saying. I don't know if it's on brand and whether it's effective or not is a secondary asset of that, but is it something that we want to be saying at all?" And this allows us to also be able to with templates and snippets to control a lot of that as well.

Connor Jeffers:
And then the last piece is how you can leverage those snippets to also be able to surface content that really powerful for your team. We talked to tons of organizations that spend so much time creating case studies and marketing assets and one pagers and nobody ever sees them, because the sales reps don't know how to find them. They don't know how to share them. They don't know what they're about and they have no idea when and who they should be sending them to. And the more that you're able to use those snippets, insert them into some of your emails and have a snippet that simply says, "I found that other marketers like you get value out of this case study," is something that your team, if you can get them conditioned to looking through those snippets so they, "Oh, cool." Marketing person, case study, click, send. It also makes it really easy for your organization to update all of those and minimize some of your rep change management, as well, as you're going through some of those processes.

Connor Jeffers:
So, role of modern sales manger. Ken, I can let you take sort of just a first pass at this overall. Sort of your experience managing multiple team leads and then we can touch on what different sales managers that we've worked with have seen to be effective.

Ken Amar:
Awesome. So, as you know, I've been at Outreach a long time. I've used it as an SDR and now as a SDR manager. A lot of people think that a sales engagement platform from Outreach is just for a sales rep, but you would be surprised at how great it is for management. Every day in the morning, I log in, I check my reps KPIs for the last week or so, how many people they pack in sequence, their account penetration, their email reply rates, their email opt out rates, their call conversion rates. I can see a ton of different metrics within Outreach. I've built out smart views for each of my different teams. I can see the kind of messaging they're sending out. Are they going after the right personas, are they using the right plays on these personas.

Ken Amar:
When we do [inaudible 00:29:57] using Outreach I can actually live listen to my reps calls and give them real time feedback and I can use that to manage my different teams in a really scalable way.

Connor Jeffers:
I think that something that Ken touched on that we see a lot is, I think, the old school sales manager and it's interesting because we used to speak to this even pre-COVID, but I think especially with COVID now, could walk the floor, overhear phone calls, see if people are doing well, maybe have some one-on-ones and real is one, with COVID and everyone working from home, the viability of that strategy is obviously significantly less but the effectiveness of that strategy is also much more limited. I think what we see being most effective in someone like Ken and a lot of the other sales managers and sales leadership folks that we see and work with is, we see a lot of people that can manage entirely with dashboards and metrics and really keep things very quantitative.

Connor Jeffers:
The qualitative conversations are still extremely important, but what we see be really effective is just a dashboard that shows each rep performance together and bars next to each other is... Not only can you create competition amongst your team, people will self-mange and look at, "Oh, wow, the other three people are way ahead of me on dials and we might want to go and get more activity on this board." You can reduce the need for someone to be going and telling people, "Hey, your numbers are really low," because they're social, they're present, and they're up and in front of people.

Connor Jeffers:
We've seen people have a lot of success doing that with TDs that are on a sales floor. Even something as simple as having, "Hey, this is a dashboard that you should have open." Whether it's an Outreach dashboard, a Salesforce dashboard that services that information and data and really leveraging all that data to help manage teams more effectively. And really a modern sales manager and someone like Ken is going to be a lot more technical than I would say the majority of folks who may share a title with Ken in other organizations and that's more and more going to be the norm, because being able to use these tools is paramount to the success to anyone that's in this role. Cool.

Connor Jeffers:
Kaitlynn, I'll kick it to you, because I know that we have a couple of questions in here that we want to answer.

Kaitlynn:
Yes. The first question that came in is, what metrics are key to track to improve your pipeline?

Ken Amar:
Awesome. I can take this one on. I think the number one most important metric is kind of a volume based metric. It's prospects added sequence daily. So, right now I have a team of 30 SDRs, their KPIs, key performance indicators, are 20 people on sequence a day. If you do the basic math, if these 30 SDRs can add an extra three people per sequence per day, it's a very light lift for each SDR, but over a team of 30 that's almost 100 net new people added sequence daily. Over the course of 20 business days, blank to September, that's a ton of new prospects that's added to sequence.

Ken Amar:
And then you get replies from those prospects, let's say you get 1,000 replies, you convert 1,000 replies, 300 meetings. And of 300 meetings, 250 become sales accepted leads. If we have an ACV of $10,000 that's an extra $2.5M in pipeline, just from adding an extra three people to sequence. So now, more than ever, volume is extremely crucial to increasing pipeline.

Kaitlynn:
Nice.

Connor Jeffers:
I think one thing to tack onto that is I actually, we also love that metric. I had no idea that was something you guys did as well, to be honest with you. But I think we really like that it even matters more because, and before you have the ability of something like an Outreach or another sales engagement platform, you are really just promoting activity, but once you're able to automate that downstream activity, one, your activity numbers should blow up so much that even managing your team, your old numbers will seem ridiculous, but more importantly, really identifying how many records we're prospecting into and sequencing and adding into this process becomes the most important aspect of it. I think it's also the one that's the easiest to control and also most representative of effort level which I think is great.

Kaitlynn:
Great. Another one that just came in, you mentioned automating, adding to sequences based on lead action. Can you share some more about that process? If you need me to repeat it, I can.

Connor Jeffers:
I can take the first piece of that, for sure. So, something we see happen a lot is leveraging, if it's in something like an Outreach specifically, we can read different Salesforce fields, so if a record comes in and it's in an MQL status, we can use marketing automation roles to determine what's the persona, what's the profile. Again, we can get even more sophisticated and use some of those data enrichment tools to say, "Title contains marketing, title level is director, what's our content that best speaks to that audience?" And then using triggers with something like an Outreach, and pull that record up into the right sequence that's geared towards that particular audience.

Connor Jeffers:
The lightest way to do that is, in something like an Outreach, there's a great triggers tool, you can add it and say, "Whenever a new lead is created, move it into this sequence." And the first task of that sequence could be write highly personalized email, which is something that Ken and his team do. We've seen people get really sophisticated with it, higher volume of leads where you can leverage, sort of a new lead can come in, we can use the marketing automation system to figure out what content were they interested in and what persona do we think that content is aligned to. We can use enrichment tools like Zoom and Forward or DiscoverOrg to add data onto that record and then use something like an Outreach to pull that into a sequence that's dedicated to that particular audience. When is it that you can slide that in both directions? And then, Ken, I can let you add anything on to that as well.

Ken Amar:
We use marketing automation. We score our leads and once they pass a certain threshold, they're automatically pushed to the SDRs. The first pass, obviously, write a custom sequence based off their engagement in the past.

Kaitlynn:
Cool. The next question we have is, how should teams handle blended budgets and goals between marketing and sales?

Connor Jeffers:
Cool. I can speak to that a little bit. I think the ROI piece is really the one that it ends up mattering most. Something that we really like to do is leverage Salesforce campaigns. If you're not on Salesforce, there are different serums, different tools to be able to do this. But, in Salesforce you're the campaign object and what we like to do is really assign what are the different activities we're engaging in. What was our budget and spend for each one? And then using roles to enroll those records into campaigns and then with some of the opportunity attribution inside of Salesforce, you can then actually directly report on. We went to this conference, we spent this much money promoting the conference on social, we sent this email to this many people and here is our budgeted flights and travel for, not so much anymore because they're all virtual, but here are all of our costs for that conference that's coming up. Adding all those onto a campaign and then looking at the ROI that then stems off of it.

Connor Jeffers:
I think that the most important thing, when looking at this, is to really make sure that you're collaborating with your marketing team, you're collaborating with your sales team and you're designing a strategy and a plan together. What we see happen a lot is, marketing says, "Hey, we have a 1,000 MQL number for the quarter so we're going to go get that." And sales said, "We have this revenue number so we're going to go get that." And no one ends up talking to each other to say, "How can we be making spends and investments and strategies together to make this happen?" I think bringing everyone to the table to really design what that approach is, is going to yield the best results.

Kaitlynn:
Another one that came in during our chat, if sales managers aren't needed to drive metrics, what should they be responsible for?

Ken Amar:
I can take that one. If they aren't responsible for driving metrics, I think the number one thing that all sales managers should be responsible for is coaching, leveling up rep skills. I think we talked a little bit earlier on some key metrics. One of them being volume. Efficiency is also another really key metric. My SDR team on average makes about 100 cold calls a day. Of 100 cold calls, they speak to only seven people, that's seven conversations a day. The typical SDR only books one meeting out of seven. With some hands on coaching, some hands on role playing, really leveling up their skill sets on cold calls. If I can drive that number from one to two across a team of 30, I can have a tremendous impact on pipeline.

Kaitlynn:
Thanks.

Connor Jeffers:
I have nothing to add. That was awesome.

Kaitlynn:
Looks like the last question we have, for now, unless people ask more questions are, how often should your sales engagement processes and strategies be re-evaluated?

Ken Amar:
I can take on a little piece of that. I can only speak for us here at Outreach, but with a content specialist who's always running experiments in the background, there's no formal re-evaluation of sequencing or templates, but continuous process. We're always tinkering at AB tests and different templates and sequences and continuously updating and refining our process. Connor, do you want to add something else onto that?

Connor Jeffers:
The thing that I would add that we do that as well for customers, modeled after a little bit of what you guys do, admittedly, which is, how can we go and look at the data that something like an Outreach creates and really evaluate what's the performance on each template, each sequence? What are our open rates, what are our click rates, what is the performance of that overall sequencing getting to its terminal endpoint which is could be a discovery call, it could be a re-engagement conversation and really understanding and evaluating how effective we're being and then constantly deploying and updating some of that messaging.

Connor Jeffers:
Something that we see happen a lot is people get something like an Outreach, they get really excited about it, they create a bunch of content, they roll it out into their organization and then everyone uses those sequences and those templates and those cadences for 12 months until someone finds out the sales reps don't use those ones anymore because they no longer speak to the value prop of the product and our ICP may have shifted a little bit once we've gone off market. What we really like to do with customers is we do a lot of ongoing management for that. If you are large enough and you have enough of a scale in your sales team, having that be somebody's role to go and look at your messaging and the performance of that is getting critically important and we've heard from lots of folks who either don't have that in-house sales ops headcount or are looking a more of a managed solution. And I think, to Ken's point, Outreach has, I don't know how many, how many SDRs do you guys have overall, Ken?

Ken Amar:
Right around 50.

Connor Jeffers:
Cool. Outreach is a huge outbound organization, they have 50 sales reps, they're investing in this really heavily. Obviously your multiples on return for smaller teams won't be as impactful but percentage wise they'll be exactly the same. So, I think to Ken's point, that's something that's super, super important to continuously optimize and improve.

Ken Amar:
Awesome.

Kaitlynn:
Okay. Great. Last call for any burning questions that might be sitting in your brain.

Connor Jeffers:
Type now or never again.

Kaitlynn:
Not really, because there's some contact information.

Connor Jeffers:
Shoot me a note if you have any questions about anything, I'm more than happy to chat. Sales strategy, talk through these other tools. If you're not an Outreach customer and you're curious about Outreach, I'm more than certain that Ken will be able hook you up with somebody who is happy to talk to you about it as well.

Kaitlynn:
Cool. All right, with that, thank you everybody for joining. We really appreciate you spending some time with us today. And with that, hopefully, we'll see you on our next webinar.

Connor Jeffers:
Awesome. Thanks so much everybody. I appreciate it. [crosstalk 00:42:15], Ken.