InBound by Hubspot 2023: How To Sell Anything To Anyone

Everybody, how's it going? How's it going? Hopefully you're having a good morning so far. Thank you for coming out. If you are getting lunch, wait and come sit down and learn how to make more money. My name's Scott Clary. I'm the host of the success story podcast, but more to the sales credentials, my backgrounds in sales and marketing. I've led sales at two companies that have been acquired and currently CEO of a CPG company. And Donald Goh. My name is Donald C. Kelly, the sales evangelist. I have a sales podcast. You should work, you should subscribe as well as you should connect with me on LinkedIn. We have a sales consulting firm out of South Florida and we train teams, help them to three to five extra sales pipeline and help them to close, double their close rate. And we just love talking all things sales. Started off as a software sales rep, started a pod, was being very successful as a sales rep and people like what I was sharing a couple of years later made sense to develop our business. And now we work with teams across the globe and even in Spanish as well. I love that. So we're here to talk about sales because I mean there's going to be a lot of conversations about sales over these past three days. But if you go into your inbox right now or you go into your LinkedIn DMs, you can see why we still have to have conversations about sales because you're still getting walls of text everywhere. And you know that's not how you sell. So you work with a lot of businesses, you work with way more businesses and I do right now like sort of optimizing their sales. What do you see that's working? What do you see that's not working? Yeah, let's start off with not working right now. How many of you in sales right now? Sales position, direct sales, some sort. How many of you here take an information back to your sales team? How many here because it's a good spot to get some work done? All right, cool. That's fine. I did that yesterday. So here's what I see with a lot of the teams that we're working with is that email is the go to thing for a 99% of BDRs. LinkedIn had a stat and the stat that they shared was that since the pandemic, email outreach has gone up by 50%. By 50%, 50% more email since the pandemic. Reply rates to email has decreased by 30%. So these are sales outreach email. The point we're trying to get at is that the inbox, everyone just feels we need to push more emails or we're going to do more canned emails. We don't want dumb canned emails anymore. And I think most people have recognized that. The other thing that we're seeing, yes, you're looking, you should come sit. Come sit. Yes. Thank you. Both of you. Cold outreach and cold calls. I'm a big fan of doing cold outreach. Doing it improper causes problems and causes a degeneration of the brand and also the seller. So that's problematic. So most people right now, they're throwing their hands up in the air and saying, what is going to work? What is going to get me those appointments? And it's not just more tech tools. I love all of these tools, but it's not just more tools. It's got to be a strategy that you got to implement. And it's not more. More doesn't necessarily equals more appointment. It's got to be strategic. So this is some of the big problems that I'm seeing when I'm working with folks. Why do you think there was a 50% uptick in emails? Because we're not sitting like during COVID, no one's sitting down for meetings anymore. We all have Zoom fatigue. So we're just defaulting to what we know, but we're just doing it at scale. And then it's just invasive. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's like it was very, it's very easy to send an email as opposed to doing the phone call. And it was harder to do phone calls in the pandemic. Like if you didn't have direct dials or people are not in the office, you can't really call them. So it was very like, let's go back to email. And then we just, I think we just fell back to what was easier. And LinkedIn though, like doing social was a huge component for us. And it still is when it comes to engaging. And we're going to talk about some of that when it comes to selling our product. But importantly, to understand, it's just that easier doesn't always make it. That's the best thing to do. And I think for most BDRs and more most sales team, it's very easy to track and see how many emails output that we've put. And then to judge on activity rather than on meaningful outreach. I love that. I think that even four years ago, there's things about LinkedIn that we were speaking about. And I know that's sort of what you focused on now and focus on, I guess, the buzzword would be social selling, which has been around for a minute now. And even when I sort of more focused on creating content about social selling, about outreach, about outbound, like this was still something that people were trying to figure out. How do I build a brand for my company? How do I build a brand for myself as an individual sales rep? How do I use LinkedIn as not just this other email platform, but how do I create my header and my info and my about and turn my LinkedIn profile basically into a resume or a landing page that allows people to see what I'm doing, see what my company is about and hopefully increase the chances of me converting or chance of them converting into a customer. So these were things we were talking about four years ago, but very few industries adopted this. And I actually think that we're very fortunate to be at inbound because everybody here is very forward thinking and everybody here is probably part of a company that focuses on building a really strong brand and focuses on evangelism to your podcast name and focuses on putting themselves out there in a really meaningful way. But there's a lot of industries that still don't do it because a lot of the people that potentially are buying your product or services don't quite get it. And a lot of the people that are not at a software marketing conference that is sort of like on the bleeding edge of marketing, they don't evangelize, they don't put themselves out there. So let's walk through, we know it's bad, doing more email is not the best way to sell. What is the best way to sell in 2023? Because I think it's still what we could have been doing for years ago, but we're not doing it yet. So I want to toss that one back to you. And we can come back to what you're, you know, I can lead it, but I feel like you have some really good points that can volley it. The thing, I'll tell you what's working for me in my business, and then we could come back and answer that question of that school. For us, and this is Scott's point, you're going to go deeper into this, so I'll volley it for you. I literally started a podcast in 2013. 2013, I started a podcast as an opportunity to cheat straight up. And the way that I cheated with the podcast was I got a chance to interview like folks like Jeffrey Gittermer and get three sales coaching for 30 minutes to 45 minutes. And I didn't have to pay a couple grand. It was great. And I was able to share what was working for me. And then the plus side I discovered is by accident. If I started interview people who were my potential customers, that could give me a good opportunity. Fast forward because of that brand that started, it gave it a very easy opportunity for people to reach out to me and ask about my services and the business developed. And again, by two years, we're partnering with companies like Presley and so forth and mentioned in a couple of magazine. What I'm getting at that's working these days is that your BDRs, your individual BDRs, your individual sales rep, you need to be a content machine in a sense that you're sharing stuff that's relevant. We have a three step concept that we use on LinkedIn. All of our campaigns, when we do outreach, our cold outreach starts with the LinkedIn. And we call it connect, share and engage, connect, share and engage. Pop question, what percentage of LinkedIn users do you feel post content monthly? Some of you may notice that. 5%, 50%, just five? Five. Can I get six? Can I get six? One percent. I got one percent. Do I have ten percent? Ten percent. Ten percent. It was two percent a year ago. So it's around three percent of LinkedIn users actually share content. Two percent of LinkedIn users sharing content. What we go back to is connect. So my BDRs, we have a focus list that we work on. Everyone has like about 20 accounts that they focus on for like a month or 45 day period. They do personal connection to those individuals or to our ICP. We use Navigator and we identify people that are new to their roles or who are using tech that we, you know, feels are part of our ICP. Then what we do is we connect with them. We share relevant content and engage with them. All of that before a first email gets to that inbox. So then go back to what you're saying. What's working for us and what we see that works is for us to start sharing, connecting, engaging on social and sharing relevant content. It makes it so much easier for our emails to outreach to open. Just a point. The whole title of this session is like how to sell out a product and we're playing around with the name of it, you know, how to sell out a product in a recession, whatever the name of it is. But the point is the fundamentals of sales do not change. So good quality outbound still matters. But what we're saying is you have to layer on different components to that, different content components, different trust building components. I mean, I'm sure many of you know the stats 70, 80, 90% depending on the data source of the information that the buyer is going to research is going to be done before they even engage with an SDR or BDR, anybody from the organization. So social selling is like, and LinkedIn and what Donald's discussing is the first step of shaping the narrative around your brand and not just leaving it the chance. This is step one. And this is again, this is how I feel everybody in every industry will eventually have to sell. It's just especially in this room, if you're not social selling, if you're not optimizing your LinkedIn strategy and you're just doing what, you know, let's pick a more legacy industry is doing, you're going to be left behind much quicker. So this is sort of the first step of social selling. So you combine outbound, traditional outbound email plus targeting the same people, you're looking for intent, you're looking for if they're the right buyer, ICP, BP, so ideal custom profile buyer persona, all that regular stuff. And then you run LinkedIn campaigns against the same people that you're running email to. And then let's just talk about, we know the strategy, what do we actually put in those messages so that they actually land and they're well received and they prompt action, because even the first thing I said was how many people open up their LinkedIn right now, you see a three paragraph cold outreach, nobody's answering that. So how do we get that answer? Yeah. So the first part that we go back to is the connection request. If any of you send that dumb LinkedIn automated connection request, I would like to add you to my network, or I see that we have mutual friends, it's garbage. Human beings, like you're talking to humans, and I'm really, I know this is get overplayed, but let me tell you, man, where are you from? Where? Los Angeles? Boston. Boston, she's Boston, perfect. So on her LinkedIn, it tells where she is from, right? I look for several different things that I can do. I'm not going to look and see what college she went to, 90% of chance we didn't go to the same college or the mutual connection, that's garbage. So what I do, I try to find something that's going to trigger her. I'm only connecting with people that are active on LinkedIn. So on the spotlight feature in sales navigator, you're welcome, that's going to be your best friend. See if people who are active on the platform, and also for us, sales leaders who are new in their roles. So those two triggers kick us off. So now, active on the platform means she may have posted within the past 30 days, so I look and see if the post that she shared was relevant, but let's say she's from Boston. So I'll say something like, I'm going to make up your name. You look like Mary. So Mary, I start off with that. Mary, I need your help settling a debate, is XYZ or XYZ the best place to get clamped shroud or in Boston? PS, permission to connect here on LinkedIn? The only reason I'm doing this again, I know she's active on a platform, so it's going to be a high possibility, and then I also find the best restaurants. When I connect with people in Philly, I do genos or what you call it. I don't know Philly. The other Philly's G610, but anyways, we do that. So you can search for restaurants or attraction. People in Miami, I might say, hey, I need you to settle an office debate here, which is the best place to get a Cuban coffee in Miami. PS, permission to connect here on LinkedIn, but it starts conversations, and it's easy to get started with. So you can find different plays. That's just one of the ones that we run with, but all of those things start a different conversation that you can trigger off. Now that we have the conversation, I don't pitch on the platform, but I just start talking to them about that, and then I send them a video. The best thing that LinkedIn has done is to give us the opportunity to show our humanity. So you can either do the voice message on the app or a video on the app. So I take a video and I say, hey, Mary, thanks for settling that debate. I appreciate you. I look forward to seeing what you're posting here. And next time I'm in Boston, I'm going to tell them that you recommended me. See you. But then now it's like this dude that I just got a chance to connect with. Actually, he's a human being. Now when I do, so that's my connecting, when we do kick off the email side, my personalized email to her subject line is going to be whatever spot she said, clam chowder, dude, dot, dot, dot. And now she's going to guarantee open that email and it's going to interact and engage because I started some kind of interaction on a off platform. And then I'm connecting my, I guess, continuing the story with my email. Sorry, it went off for a minute. No, you're good. It's really important to drive home in the world of endless automation and endless leverage. And how many sessions were about AI? It's always about how do we do more? How do we do more? How do we become more efficient? When you're selling, it's still a human to human transaction interaction. And what Donald's saying, he has one strategy on how to guarantee that the person on the receiving end of that message knows that it's not just another robot. Now AI gives us some advantage because now we can use generative chat to customize, but I still don't just let AI fly without any sort of human oversight. But if you don't even want to try AI and your sales outreach and you don't want to go down that pathway, like go to their Twitter, go to go to their Instagram, don't be creepy, but like just find something relevant or something that humanizes you. The video is a good one as well. So now you have this hyper-personalized outreach that again, you also want to be wary of the fact that you only have so many hours in a day. So one thing that I've done and I think that most people do this to some degree is like highest profile targets. It's called like a one-to-few one-to-many strategy. And when you're targeting one-to-few, that's the people that exactly match your ICP and your buyer persona with intent to buy. Those are the people that you actually customize everything and it's like a labor intensive process because they have the highest chance of buying. And then you can also do one-to-many, which is more automated. But I know you do these automated campaigns that still have a level of personalization. You don't just send videos to everyone, but you still, I know that you do. So maybe explain that how you still include personalization in your automation to the masses. Yeah, I focus on the role because let's say a VP of sale, they're going to have the same problem typically in the industries that we're going after. It's going to be the same thing. So what we want to do though, we want to find those VP of sales that are going to be active on the platform, VP of sales that are, you know, like some of the other triggers. Like if they're tip companies hiring, and if I see that their BDRs are on social or on LinkedIn, like those are some of the things, I know their problems are going to be the similar things that we're that we're going to find. And then if I can start off that personal connection, then I can kick off an automated campaign to all of those people. And I do use some of the different automated tools out there, but it's not, it's not at that point, those campaigns are really, really hyper focused on the problems you're facing. And now I have relevancy because of my LinkedIn relationship with you. I love that. Forms of relevancy that we look at. I think that that's the word that I have coined as our word for 2023 and 2024 relevancy, relevancy, relevancy. Because sometimes I get email that, no, I'm the owner of the business, it's not relevant to me to solve that that pain doesn't, I don't touch that pain where it doesn't impact me. And then also relevancy to sometimes people will just send out me a message. But does that really, do I really have pain to that? And that's where your triggers and the the behaviors that intent can help us to make sure that our not only are messages relevant, but to the individual that is relevant. And then that allows me to open that email or go deeper to book an appointment with the sales rep. Do you want to talk about content? Let's start content. Let's talk content. So basically, both of our thesises, thesises on sales is we have to have the outbound nailed down. So we have the personalization in the outbound, but something that has been hyper important to both of us and both of our successes is creating really strong content marketing strategies for businesses. And I feel like, again, most people in this room, they have brands that create really good content, but we're not just speaking to people in this room, we're speaking to legacy industry, just speaking to the boring businesses quote unquote that don't get content. So let me let me paint a picture. My background is in sales very much aligned with how you run your outbound. I created a podcast, you created a podcast and we all sort of figured out this content marketing play. Why I understood how powerful content was is my better half sitting in the first row when we started dating, she runs one of the largest Instagram meme accounts in the world. It's 8.2 million followers. It's my therapist says, we'll give her a follow, but she built this brand with her two other sisters and a best friend from scratch and they do deals with Netflix, with Gucci, with Sony, with Airbnb, with hinge, with hefty, you know, the garbage bags, like they do deals with everybody. They have never sent an outbound message in their eight-year history. It has been entirely inbound and these are not small RFPs. These are 100,000, 200,000 plus dollar RFPs for brands who want to get access to their audience. So how do we combine these two worlds? You're thinking about I have a strong outbound team, is that most businesses are built, they're doing outbound sales. But now the future of sales is not just outbound, you call it whatever you want, it could be inbound, it could be demand generation, HubSpot does this incredibly well, they built out, they're basically their company on SEO blogs, and then that dovetailed into the podcast network and the creator network that they're building out right now because they get the value of content and like let's look at how HubSpot's doing, not so bad, right? So your business has to figure out a content strategy, I've built out a podcast, it is a strong content strategy for my personal brand, you've built out one for yourself. When you think about content, the question that usually comes up is I don't know how to figure out the ROI, you have content, that's the biggest issue that people have. I think the issue is that you're tying ROI to content too early in your content creation cycle. If you look at, let's look at Casamigos with George Clooney, let's look at all the Kardashians, let's look at how fast Alex Ramosi became a household name and now turned his content machine into a top of funnel for basically like a private equity slash VC fund. So content works, it's just a matter of are you measuring whether or not the content is good and that measurement originally was like likes and comments but now it's the shares and the saves and is this content resonating with an audience and is that audience then pushing it out to their peers and then when that happens then you will not immediately recognize the ROI but what will happen is you're going to tap into something called dark social or dark channels. What this is is when in a company slack I get basically a link to a company's Instagram. As the VP of sales for that company who put that Instagram out there I don't know that that was shared in the company slack but that's creating social proof and if we know how sales works for some enterprise deals it's seven to 15 different touch points before somebody trusts their company enough to buy and what this dark social as well as social we can actually measure is doing is it's adding on to those touch points and then all of a sudden when they speak to an SDR BDR that hits them outbound all of a sudden they've learned about your company they've seen your company everywhere they've seen some of your content go viral they know what your company's about they've seen you on YouTube they are subscribed to your newsletter how much easier is it for an SDR BDR to sell. Way easy. So let's talk about even how you built out your podcast and some of the strategies and your content strategy and I can talk about mine after but go for it. Yeah and I just want to aim at everything that Scott shared there if you think about this again your content and I it's the word it just feels like sometimes you know we might we we just say hey it's content but it's edutaining right you really have to edutain like you need to make sure whatever you're sharing is impressive enough that it grabs my attention but it also entertain me enough that I'm going to continue to listen or continue to watch so with our strategy what we decided to do was we look at what were like when I first started a podcast I asked people who were following listeners to the show I said go ahead and connect with me on LinkedIn everyone that connected with me on LinkedIn what I would do with them I'll give them a shout out in an episode so I might say my friend Mary here from Boston I'll say big shout out to Mary from Boston or whatnot and I spent like just like a you know five 10 second you know what like first 15 20 seconds as I do my intro and blah blah and do that but people felt like they were engaged with me what I'm getting back to here then I should ask the Mary's of the world now my DMs with her what are the biggest challenges you're facing what are some of the topics I want to get some content for our podcasts whatever Mary was facing is the same things that she was going to hurt teammates were facing so that we started really really focusing our content around the problems of our ICP what the sales reps and the sales leaders were facing. That's that pillar content yeah that that 30 to 60 minute podcast audio video that then turns into it's like that's the the Gary V content strategy that's where you take that one piece of goes everywhere literally everything else can come from that but the idea though that we felt that we saw and we fell on this all by accident was that we needed to make sure that we were visible like the visibility was just absolutely critical I ran into a gentleman last night over here I was walking to to get dinner and I you didn't know I was here right he had no clue I thought I lived in Boston so he's like are you Donald Kelly and I was on a phone my wife and she was like oh brother you think you're all cool but this guy recognize me and recognize our brand from a podcast or somebody else shared with him the quote the point is like because of that type of that idea I mean I've been doing it for 10 years but if you don't have to be doing it for that long the concept though is that you need to make sure your brand is visible and that you have enough things that people can relate to before you actually start doing the outreach to them even with what we're talking about with social with like the BDRs if we're doing engagement activities prior to us sending that first email there's a way higher chance and what we're talking about share content engage and then the email it's going to be money in the bank all day long I'll give you a case study of a legacy company and I can't name the company but I can name what they do and how we're working with them so it's an accessibility company and they create ramps and they have a super strong outbound they have a great partner and affiliate channel and what they're struggling with is it's a race to the bottom because the product they create made in the USA if you go to China it's like half the price or a third of the price right so how do we differentiate ourselves when our outbound works and our partner channels work and we're on Amazon and we're in lows and we're in Home Depot so what they're doing is they're creating basically this full stack content strategy so the pillar content is going to be founder origin story plus interviews with industry leaders that's the pillar content as long as the pillar content is answering questions that the potential buyer could have and is on point with the subject matter then all the derivative content is also going to work out so you record audio video podcasts you can transcribe it with like an otter.ai or any transcription tools turn that into a newsletter turn it into a blog on your website you take short little post from that goes out on Twitter you take obviously the video goes on you got to get it right what it's X not Twitter it's X my bad on X and then you got these 30 to 60 second clips that go up on all your social and again concern is where's the ROI you see the ROI over a period of times I think the goal should really be how do we create content that share that save and also drive the cost of creating that content down which is why these pillar content strategies that have all these derivative pieces it's a really cost efficient way to create content because it doesn't require ideation of every single piece which is probably what most of these businesses are doing anyways already right now so you have all these pieces that stem from this pillar piece and that's what's going to differentiate them and simultaneously to telling these stories interviews and founder story we're also collaborating with influencers in the space I mean if you want to go even deeper you can look at trending viral content in whatever industry niche that you're in on TikTok on Twitter you can stitch or remix with these creators so once somebody who creates viral content on Twitter on on TikTok or Instagram once they upload it you can see what's viral you can remix it and you can add your own context your own insight you've seen these types of videos where somebody like green screens them over a viral video you already know it's going to go viral and you're perfectly able to do that so there's these content strategies that really differentiate you when somebody looks up accessibility ramps you're going to be I promise you the only person that ranks on Google and shows up on YouTube and shows up on Twitter and shows up on Instagram and shows up on TikTok so start now especially in some industries that are not as forward thinking in terms of their marketing and you can really benefit yeah and I think that's a low hanging fruit right there especially in those non sexy industries right it's because nobody else is doing it in order to be successful do the opposite of what everyone else is doing and I and go back to what you're sharing with this idea if you're talking my execution now how do we make sure this happens I can't just tell my sales rep to just quit and start doing content it really becomes down to your to a collective effort from your from marketing and from sales so made a CRO maybe leading initiative like this but we got to make sure I don't know if anyone want to send rush a session yesterday the CMO when they were talking about was just like humanizing of how they're doing their content their paid content and also their organic content it really just needs to come back down to those stories and if I can and if you think about that as a marketing team don't send those to your sales team your sales reps and say hey just take this down and re-share it like a sales rep can create a really meaningful post on LinkedIn relative to a video if it speaks to the pain or relative to a blog relative you know speaking to that pain but then that individual sales rep becomes to build their own authority in the niche that you're already capitalizing with your content and it makes it so much more easier to sell your products and your services I think that's actually a really good segue into a point you brought up which is the evolution of the sales rep what is the sales rep what is the relationship with the customer back when I was still in tech we had you know inside outside BDR account executive that was like you know the what is it the the setter and spiker model whatever it is that's how everybody operated but Donald brought up a really good point about not only having a sales rep evolve into a content creator brand evangelist so it's not just a celebrity CEO it's a celebrity individual in the company now and there's a couple people if you go on LinkedIn you will find people to do the thing I can't remember the names I thought in my head but if you go on LinkedIn the people to show up again and again and again some of them are working for companies and not only are their own careers accelerating but they're driving business because they show up all the time they're asked to speak they're post go viral so you see these people and I'm saying that people in every organization should think about doing this and enabling their sales force to do this and not just enabling through like saying like this is how you do it and maybe training them on how to create good content but also giving them the psychological safety to engage in content creation because I think that there's some apprehension if I'm working for a company where no one else is doing it and I put myself out there and am I going to get you know chastised by the CEO are they going to be upset for building a personal brand don't worry about that don't worry about them building a personal brand it's going to be to the net benefit of the company and if they leave that's fine because you have a process and SOPs in place for turning people in your company into brand evangelist but you said a really good point about the evolving role the sales reps we're talking about evolving into a content creator but also talk about evolving in terms of not just SDR BDR AE but full cycle why are you I guess for lack of a better word bullish on full cycle sales reps yeah I was a full cycle sales rep and then we saw the the the the the client of the full cycle sales rep but go back to what we started talking about the relationship the relationship the relationship the humaninization it's very very easy in some of our processes to push the BDR out the gate let's say how long does it take for BDR to land an appointment with a cold prospect maybe it's going to take could be taken like three months could take a couple months but then think about that I now have been chasing you I'm asking about clam chowder and Boston and all of these things that we've built this relationship and as I hate let me go ahead and connect you with Scott and Donald doesn't exist anymore he's gone he's gone forever he never never hear from him again it's how sales relationships to work yeah which is not good but when you have like the the rise of the full cycle people want that I found that people want that continuity and you don't have to necessarily I'm not saying get rid of your BDRs but having that person that's be able to engage in that process and have the BDR more engage rather than just a handoff and fall away but being able to still have that presence with it I think there's a big notion for that and buyers don't want to like I we most companies understand the playbook every last one of you have a sales team you have the playbook where you have SDR BDRs you have your AES we know what's going to happen already change it up a little bit don't necessarily just follow the same plays give them something different make it a little more of a humanistic opportunity for that person and I think that makes big difference I think it's about I think it's about not over optimizing everything to the end degree and always focusing on a human first human centric approach this is not going to work for every organization but also sometimes you know saying this is the way we've always done it is like the death of a company so I really do believe that as VP sales CRO CMO CIO whatever it is build feedback loops yeah engage with that sales force like B boots on the ground go on ride along with those are still the thing in the post covid world jump on zoom calls like you want to engage and you want those feedback loops so that you understand and test this out because like everything else it's so funny in the marketing world we AB test like everything we AB test everything and very rarely do we AB test how our sales org is set up because it's scary to touch and you don't have to revamp the whole thing but we're just saying if you don't evolve sometimes you die so you have to try and evolve and and maybe look at other opportunities that haven't been explored in your organization if things are not working the way that they that you want them to Scott I know we are we want to do questions yeah yeah um anyone have any questions don't be shy all right we got a question we got a couple questions here with a mic we have a mic so I got my friend Mary no no Mary did have a question no in front of Mary right in front of Mary she had a question keep your hand raised and then we have another one over here yep I think you for a talk so from the practical standpoint if your sales rep doesn't want to go and linked and then doesn't want to become celebrity do you fire them replace them with someone better or how do you coach them if they're good at what they do then whatever they're if they're doing something good and keep doing what they're doing but if it's not working and they're not willing to at least try something new maybe you look and see if that's the best position for them um I talked about this yesterday in a podcast interview um and we don't need the sales rep to become a celebrity per se what we just need them again one person think about your your just go back to these basic math here if I'm if I'm getting my ice my ideal customer my focus accounts and I'm connected with those people on LinkedIn they're not my connections naturally if I'm posting content there's a high probability that those individuals that I'm focusing on are going to see that content and it doesn't have to be video or whatnot your team can help them to create simple content pieces but posting something once a week increases their chance of visibility so before they even make that phone call it helps them I'll give you what I do with our approach as well because we share content regularly on our team we look at people who are engaging on those posts so any of you connect with me and you start you know you start engaging on my content I'll look at it and see if any of those are ICPs or any of them are focus accounts and then I send a personal message to you so again pick on my friend Mary that does not name Mary from Boston so we connected and then she saw my post at outbound talking about cold outreach and then she is like give it a big thumbs up so then I might send her a message because she's a VP of sales and I'll say Mary thanks so much I appreciate your comment and I'm doing this as an audio that's going to increase the chance again of me when I send that email to her if we have any email yet that she's going to open an email so the goal of this is again we want to make sure we can be of a presence to start engagement prior to that cold outreach so we can if they're coachable to do it yes now the majority of people don't post on LinkedIn because it's a professional network and they don't want to seem like an idiot but the most content that we post on LinkedIn that's the best is just a human one I'll give you last thing my son in the pandemic he's for now I got his permission maybe not but he's for but every week when he started when he turned one and a half to we started to I think was we started cutting his hair so we started this thing called fresh cut Fridays so every week every two weeks and I haven't cut my hair a couple weeks been traveling but every two weeks we go for a haircut and we call it a fresh cut Friday I do my educational post but when I do that one it's amazing and I get clients and prospects they'll say hey I saw I saw your post I was at a conference last week and my son was with me and my wife two weeks ago and it's and he ran up the aisle and this dude said afterwards he's like I recognize your son before I recognize you so it was like that again the content I'm not milking my son for that it's just something that we do personally for us the point is sharing humanistic content helps and things that people can relate to so it doesn't have to be like dessert a fifteen point of how to do an industrialized mechanical process no I just want to just say to your point I think that building it into the onboarding process is important so I would say like optimizing LinkedIn profile is like how you onboard reps into your organization and you can have the the header image done corporate guidelines you can take a head shot you can give them a bio you give them all the tools they need to succeed like you would with any other any other thing you're doing for a new sales rep and then to your point if they're not comfortable creating and ideating on content then you have things that are rolled out for your sales reps to post but you will definitely have a portion of your of your team that is like very yes I want to post my own stuff let them go but I wouldn't fire people over it we have we have a hand right here and then we'll come back over here what conversion rate do you typically see with the connect share page and in terms of conversion rate just getting a meeting like you know foot in the door yeah so what we do with our let's say let's just give a simple number if I were to do it from like 10 connection outreaches that we do we see probably about 60% of those are going to reconnect back with us and then from the engagement when we do the emails to those individuals now we see about a 40 50% that those reply back and help us to get landed on appointments because that email now is really really hyper focused and there's a concept I think it was I forgot it was I think it was somebody a gong they or maybe was a a challenger but they call it the show me you know me and I show me you know me strategy just helps tremendously when I look at my email inbox my fingers on the trigger to delete like straight up so I'm like show me an excuse to delete you so when I see an email Donald see delete if I see a subject line that looks dumb delete if I see it's an automated email delete like you know one of those things but when I see something that catches my attention and like I cannot delete that because it's show me you know me and go back to like our caveman days right we want to see if if somebody doesn't we don't know someone we got to put up our barriers because it could be like a foe that want to hurt us so in that same idea with the inbox when I see a name that I remember a recognizable name or a brand I'm I'm not as easy to delete that so I got past the first barrier it's catchy enough clam charity guy then I'm going to open it and then now the relevancy of that I saw that you guys are hiring you know Mary I saw that you guys are hiring some BDRs congratulations on that out of curiosity though has LinkedIn been a huge factor for you guys when it comes to helping your team with outbound now she's gonna more than likely respond because it's relevant to her as the VP of sales and they're trying to improve and I might do a little bit deeper with that but the point is my value prop is totally relevant to her and it's she I know her or show that I know her so it increases I'm not showing we're not showing like a hundred outbound activities per day but we're showing like maybe a 40 to 50 outbound activities per day and those activities are given way better results and we use text message a lot too as well because we focus only on the direct down thanks Apollo anyways yeah hopefully no you're good oh yeah um do you have any resources you could share that would encourage content creation among sales reps content creation content creation for sales reps so what I do is I look even from my own content strategy and it would be the exact same for a sales rep I look at people that are doing quite well on every single platform and those are the people that I emulate so on LinkedIn I'll emulate Justin Welsh because he has great content on Twitter you can look at I mean Alex I'm mostly killed on most platforms but the hill bloom is good on Twitter as well on Instagram Chris Doe is really good at creating content on Instagram so I look at people that are doing well on each platform and then I model how they create their content and that's really the strategy you don't have to reinvent the wheel so I would find people that are creating content similar to what your sale what you want your sales reps to put out and then that's the model that you follow and unpack that and train them on that and get them to like every single day those people that I just mentioned I go on their social and I just see what they're putting out and like that's how I learn and that's how I train myself on how to create better content so we have a course called a LinkedIn prospecting course we're just in Columbia last week and one of the things that we were talking about with this team this team was very apprehensive like the leaders are like I don't know man what if we start creating you know helping these people create content and then all of a sudden like you know they're you know they're leaving us or whatnot but then that doesn't happen what I saw and John Barrows big shout out to John Barrows if you don't know him follow him but one of the things John talked about like it was gathering the team your BDRs are Gen Zs and they're young folks or even younger than that right now they know what to do already I would highly recommend that you put them in a room together and ask them and give them permission but you got to get some right off on this get them permission to say hey we want to make sure we have presence on LinkedIn whatever your product is say my product is a window washing services like what are some content you would create that will speak to the pain about a window washing service and if you let them go I promise you they'll come back with more brilliant things that you they can do and you can make sure that it's in line with the brand and and so forth the brand identity but put them together and have them have the discussion rather than from a top down it'll make us such a huge difference one more point on what you just said which is actually very important the person you're gonna hire now is not gonna stay with your company for 30 years no one does that anymore and that's fine so like little leadership lesson when you hire somebody figure out where they want to go in their career you create a contract an agreement with them give me two of your best years three of your best years and I'm gonna take you to where you want to go it could be different role different job outside of your inside there doesn't matter you have to know how people operate and think anything else is just being naive so you make a contract with them and you say three of your best years two of your best years I'm gonna take you to where you want to go you're gonna be loyal to my organization you're gonna give me the time and you're gonna deliver and you're gonna hit the metrics and then after that that's fine if you want to renegotiate in two years fine that's no problem but that's how people that's how people view jobs and we have to lead and hire the way that people actually want to work it's very important and to do otherwise they're gonna leave and you're just gonna be like oh no I wasn't planning on this person leaving after two years and now I got to find and fill a spot I'm saying plan ahead for that that's to your point about they create content that become a investor they leave and I want to just quick quick story real quick there was a when I worked at software we started a podcast one of my buddies he helped co-create the biggest podcasting event in the world podcast movement and he got in trouble because he was sharing content or doing stuff on you know on social and our company thought we're we're trying to leave the you know that we're trying to you know leave the company we're just trying to figure out a way to be more successful my team they wouldn't allow us to do certain things so one of my co-workers and I literally created a blog we're in a in a software and to city county governments in k-12 and we wrote these blogs and people were finding them and we landed in an appointment from our blog the point I'm trying to get at they were trying to suppress us so much and eventually we we both left and now we have both thriving organizations so if you want to take advantage of that time that they have making that incubator help them to be successful otherwise they're gonna find an outlet but give them that opportunity and you'll be amazed what they'll do for your brand if that brand had given us the platform bro we would have been creating content for them for days and I probably would be in a golden handcuff with them yeah 100% any other questions one last oh we got two over here we'll stick around all day we're here for hours the stage manager is giving us a side I was like I don't think we're out too long uh particularly for uh I totally connected with the boring industry thing that you guys are talking about before like compliance not a super sexy industry uh so for particularly top of the funnel content one is is that something that we should be throwing some investment into and two if that's the case you know top of funnel they're not necessarily thinking about your product today so how do you produce content that they are both educated by entertained by they care about but it's also at least somewhat relevant to your industry um so is that a possibility or am I thinking about it wrong I have to do it afterwards do you want to go join me to go don't say we forgot to guess one after oh okay cool so the way that I think about it so the one example that I used we're both types of content we're creating are technically top of funnel because that's the first point of contact that anybody will find basically find this brand right it's it's a it's an accessibility company so one pillar of content is the founder origin story which is more of like an entrepreneurial talking about why they're doing this there's like an emotional point to it as well that will be useful to build trust but it will not be the most viral content so simultaneous while we're creating this founder origin story and putting that across social we are also on social we are remixing and we are stitching with viral content in that niche so the viral content in that niche we already know it's going to get 100 200 300000 a million views and that's going to bring people in they're going to hear the founder's story they're going to trust the brand and they're probably at this point they see viral content they get it to forward looking company they trust the founder the founders faces on their social media they're going to send it to somebody this is where that dark that dark communication comes in they're going to send it to somebody who could benefit from this product or service and then that's a social proof so this is how I would I wouldn't just do the the story content or the interview content alone you do need some virality but the nice thing about social is this democratized virality if you understand how to look for it so just you that's where this stitching and this remixing of content that is viral can really help your brand draw those really actually even more top of funnel customers into start to learn about your founder learn about your origin story learn about your company in the most boring industries as well ladies and gentlemen thank you so much feel free to connect with Scott on what's the best place to connect with you you can anywhere is at Scott DeClaire all social is the same and at Donald C Kelly appreciate you will stick around and answer some questions