The Rise of Video, Social Selling & Sales Enablement w/ Smarketing Show & Rick Lambert #scottsthoughts

Welcome to success story the most useful podcasts in the world. I'm your host Scott D. Clary the success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network the HubSpot podcast network has incredible podcasts like the Martek podcast hosted by Benjamin Shapiro each week the Martek podcast tells stories of world class marketers who use technology to create lasting success with their business and their careers if you like any of these topics science is changing advertising how to set up a CRM so you actually use it private equities take on digital transformation by big social is focused on newsletters if these are topics that resonate with you go check out the Martek podcast wherever you get your podcasts or you can also go listen at HubSpot.com slash podcast network today you're going to hear me on the marketing show hosted by Rick Lambert we're going to speak about top three trends that you have to care about for your business in 2021 2022 maybe 2023 event so it's video social selling and sales enablement and we're going to speak about why these three things are so important for any entrepreneur any business owner to really understand grass and to double down on and implement so this is myself on the marketing show with Rick Lambert welcome to this marketing show hosted by award winning B2B sales performance coach Rick Lambert who has been selected by many of the world's most recognized companies to help the market and sell to win let's join Rick now hello welcome to this marketing show one of my favorite guests of all time I got back on trick them on Scott Clary thanks for joining me today buddy you know your podcast the success story podcast we're just selected by HubSpot by the way one of 10 shows what a great recognition for the great work you're doing I told my team this morning I don't know many people it knows much as you do about sales and marketing and you know we were talking before and I said Scott what would be three things that you think any business leader should be thinking about it and I said Scott what would be three things that you think any business leader should be thinking about right now moving forward you said video social selling and sales enablements so maybe let's talk about video why do you think that's so important why is video important first of all you can't hype me up so much I think you have to you have to start off the podcast you have to like you know set the expectations that he's not that great he doesn't know that much because and everything that comes after that's just good now I really got a show up so you're putting that you're putting the pressure on right um but uh okay listen we so we got videos a number one and why did I think this was a number one thing because I think that in a world of email and noise I think that video cuts through the noise it humanizes sales again and it's something that right now not a lot of people are comfortable doing and I think that that allows it to differentiate yourself as a sales rep so how do you actually include video when you're selling so the there's a lot of ways you can include video right we're we're doing a podcast right now recording this that's video there's video on YouTube there's uh product demo videos we're talking about uh sales rep using video to record themselves to pitch or to speak to a customer so in terms of tech there's various tools that do it you can do uh vidyard or bongero that'll hide and report short little videos that you can send to your customers and they set it up so that you can build these into your sale and drop-down sale sequences quite easily so for example when a new lead comes in uh you'll get notifications or record an instant video for them if you want to personalize video and of course with any sort of outbound campaign you can do a one to few or or hyper personalize so that I'm just sending one video for example to Rick trying to sell Rick or you can do one to many where I have perhaps a pre-templated video that can go out to as really as many people as I wanted to so of course like anything in sales presenting an email the type of personalized it's always going to be a little bit better so you want to make sure that you're best possible ICPs customer profiles personas that really fit uh you're probably going to try and personalize but you can also run a little bit of one defeat I want to many excuse me so that of course you have some volume and you can scale yourself so what do you have to put in a video um in my opinion I think a video should follow a very similar format to a uh to an email so the format that I like for emails and Rick actually has a really good example because he was uh he was actually walking through a script for videos as well that's why we started speaking about this but um the pieces of the video that I think you should have would be a number one why you so you're helping the person understand why they're receiving a video from you so it could be as simple as um you just submitted a lead on my website and I wanted to reach out to you to speak about whatever you just submitted a lead about or it could be something more complicated like referencing um why other if you're selling to CMOs why other CMOs have been trying to solve a problem that you maybe trying to solve as well um then I would also say you want to have the why now so after the why you the why now so you want to establish some sort of time frame that they should be making a purchasing decision within why it's relevant to them now why you think they could have intent to buy as opposed to something that could be on you know the uh the budget for the next fiscal year why is it relevant now of course to you know speed up your sales velocity and then I always like including a short little anecdote so 15 seconds that references a similar a similar situation or case study that you've already you've already sold to so another customer you sold to that you're solving a problem a big company or a company it's actually in the same category as the company that you're speaking to now so a short little anecdote that sort of validates that you've already sold this product of the solution or solved the pain point for somebody similar to the person that you're sending the video to and lastly a call to action so what are they going to do uh are they going to for example book a call with you do you want them to reply to this video which sometimes some of these tools allow them to email you directly um you have to have some sort of CTA whatever that is so that's those would be my four main things you should cover in a video the why you the why now a short little anecdote that provides invalidation or social proof and then a call to action but Rick you also had a really good you actually had a very specific thing that you were going to use in a video that I think is relevant for this as well well you know uh okay I've watched you many times on video you're comfortable on video and I think you know we were talking before the recording and you asked who's the audience and I said it's pretty much a legacy in many cases our viewers which which would represent the corporate typical sales force and I just find that we see so many great sales people professional business leaders they're afraid to go on video and uh you know I'm doing programs now with corporate sales teams literally how to shoot a selfie video and I know these yeah I just find they don't know what to say they don't want to get embarrassed and uh so what we started to do with company scott is suggesting the onboarding that when you interview somebody have them submit a video at minimum never mind interviewing this way just to see if the person's comfortable because it's the the fact oh standard um but yeah I mean there's different templates but uh so video you know last time we talked to you made a comment that I is still stuck with me you talked about the celebrity president of a company and how you know it's great to have the sales people or whatever but how important it is for maybe the business leader to bring some of those elements you know the personalization the human aspect the video maybe you could speak a little bit about what why you think the leader should be out there on video sure um and I do believe that I think to your point I think everybody should start to feel comfortable on video that's kind of the reason why um that's the reason why we should be encouraging video more for sales reps now I like that where you if you're gonna you know bring on new sales rep you have to have them submit a video I think it's important um why the leader why should the leader be on video because it if no one else is going to represent your company in that way at the bare minimum there has to be a human associated with the company um we are at a point where again it comes back to all the noise all the all the noise in the world there's so many companies that are trying to sell us things and at the end of the day it doesn't matter if it's B2C or D2C or B2B it's all B2 human it's all business selling to a human and if no one else is in the company is going to go on video bare minimum should be the leader because that builds an element of trust it breaks down those ominous corporate veils that for some reason people think it's okay to hide behind you look at business social media it's so boring and bland you look at the way they interact with the customers like the first human experience that you have with the business shouldn't be when you get on a phone with an SDR or an inside sales rep I think that by encouraging the leader to put themselves out there not only does it build trust with the customer because they realize they're talking to a real a human person and it will also like anything if you're trying to be a good leader if you're going to set the example for your sales reps you've got to do it first you can't ask your sales reps to do things that you're not willing to do yourself so if you've already bought an idea like yes if I want to communicate with my customer that I have to have a template that makes my sales reps feel comfortable template that I just described that you can just sort of use for your videos it's really just copying and pasting best practices for email and then putting those into video but on top of that if I'm going to encourage the behavior of getting people to jump on video and to send 30 seconds 30 second videos to clients or even get my get my employees to want to contribute to a YouTube channel or something like that which you see for example go look at product time they have all their employees jumping on and creating videos for their YouTube channel if if you can get that kind of buy into video you will have employees evangelizing the company but you'll also have a little army of people out there that are putting a face to the company putting their face out and that'll build more trust with your customers I think it all starts with leadership for sure it all starts with leadership being comfortable jumping on video and speaking to their customers putting video on YouTube sending a 30 second clips to to the to you know to your actual customers I think that's where it starts and then you can start asking and enabling your your sales seem to do it as well at the start with you for sure yeah you know the face on the business is so relevant I remember when I was working with anger micro years ago in Toronto and we had supporting your coaching over 300 reps cross Canada I was saying to the leader at the time I said why don't we put the picture of the sales rep in the email signature that way the customer is not dealing with this faceless because they have a meeting inside salesperson yeah anyway fast forward anyway I'm a believer of video is you know and I would just encourage people to give it a try and you know don't expect your first one to go perfect but like anything you know if you stick with it you know great things will come I'm gonna give you a more on that one to do some video so when I try and get because I'm I'm doing this too I'm trying I I send videos through LinkedIn if I'm trying to sell some of the apps I'm sending like one to one I do one to one yeah I do one to one you can do it from your phone or there's a few apps that actually allow you to do it from your desktop but I can't remember the names of those apps desktop in my head so I do it from my phone and I'm literally just holding it up recording it and pressing send yeah I've asked my reps to do that before obviously pushback a lot of people are uncomfortable so I just get them to do it to me until they feel comfortable because I know that if they record and send 20 videos to me it could be the 21st it could be the 51st they're eventually going to feel comfortable sending videos and then they just start doing that to all the actual customers but it's literally getting over the the your your own nerves of of recording a couple sentences and feeling like you're not stumbling over your own and after you do that honestly just do like 20 of them and send them to like your friend or just do them and don't even send them to anybody but after you 20 of them you have this you know this little formula this same formula you're going to use in your email the why you why now a little anecdote and then cta cta called the action you're it's going to be like flowing like butter it's going to be like you're going to be it's going to be so easy but the first time is always tough the 10th time is a little bit better the hundredth time it's like your pro and again not a lot of people do it so the the the the bar is very low it's really just doing it sending it and you're going to get a you'll see a higher response rate if you were going to send video versus just text an email or LinkedIn or whatever you'll see a higher response rate so what you're talking about here is I would argue one of the most underutilized easy free ways to do through one-to-one message and just record like you say yeah the one thing that I remember a guy came up come off a TV and he told me Rick when you're shooting video you always got to think about the end before you start because I find a lot of times when we're on video we ended like a voiceball right and I look forward to hearing from you soon so just think about the ending you know maybe something like and I hope this you know message was a value or I look forward to talking next Wednesday have a specific like Scott saying called action at the end but what about social selling like you know you're obviously you've seen the evolution of this and surprisingly some people are still realizing hey I actually this COVID thing I got to be on social media and get social maybe you could speak to what you're seeing in that space and what's working so social selling includes a few components so it's it's a high it's a broad term that encompasses encompasses like reaching it on LinkedIn building out a profile that positions you as a subject matter expert even running campaigns on LinkedIn as part of your you know your email and your call calling so social selling now I think is starting to become the status quote I know people that even know how to sell with Instagram DMs they sell on Twitter let's not go down that rabbit hole just yet I just want to bring people to speed on say using LinkedIn so social selling if I'm using you know I'm using the the outbound example social selling could just be including LinkedIn as part of my outbound sequence so if I'm doing you know the the numbers are 7 to 15 different touch points for an enterprise for an enterprise sale before you're going to get in touch with the decision maker so I'm splitting up those touch points across email and phone and then LinkedIn that's that's an easy way to think of social selling another way to think of social selling and that just makes that just makes sense because the targeting options are so great on LinkedIn that you can find any job title role company size you know geographical region in the world and you can laser target so it just makes it easier to reach out because you have direct access access to these people the other way you can social sell is by positioning yourself as a subject matter expert in your industry or your fields and how do you do that well you're creating valuable content it's answering the questions that your potential buyer or decision maker could be asking so you're literally posting content and it's not just posting frivolous content you do that stuff to it it doesn't matter you post whatever you want obviously don't insult anybody but you can post stuff about your you know your family or kids whatever but a lot and a lot of your content actually the one thing the one the one piece of content that I wouldn't advise you to post is selling your services I would say that you should 90% of your content should be education and maybe like 5 to 10% should be actually saying hey sign up for a webinar or hey try this product or you know sign up here for a demo or reach out to me to do whatever you know it is I'm trying to sell you're trying to to get you to do so most of your content should be teaching and answering questions that your potential buyer could be asking so you have to know what those questions are that's fine but if you've sold even one product to one customer you're gonna have an idea of the questions that are coming up in those calls good you guys I'm the same guy so no one is saying what you're saying okay if I'm watching right now I'm like yeah yeah you know educational versus promotional and I do when I record a TV program you know you got to probably fast work through the commercials right the pitches but I don't think people like understanding it and doing it are two different things if you look at the social streams on so many corporate feeds like especially SMB you know they're posting brochures and they're posting like stuff there and I'm big on stop the scroll how do you stop the scroll so we just went to a company and I said look at a to use video be to get their faces on social media and we're big you know we're all in unlinked in by the way and I've heard you mentioned that's your thing you do the true I just I just talk about it on podcast you actually train it for a living well what what we do is we go to the company we say to the sales team this is all basic it is everybody come up with two frequently asked questions in this case we had I think eight sales reps in this one team each person zoom call they were captured boom boom boom everybody answered we had 16 now little videos micro videos on questions to your post and they don't need us necessarily to do that they could do it themselves and just post that organic content on the company they get their people tied in because everybody wants to watch when their bodies on a video it puts a face but I just think people that are listening right now saying hey I heard that before I would challenge you to look at your social stream is okay how much video how many faces of your people are in there is it educational be honest or you pushing your product with deal of the week of the month because there is an art like you know social selling I would argue is the fine art okay letting someone else get your way and yeah yeah anyway started to jump in I just I don't know it's a good one down now why do why have you mentioned LinkedIn so much like I'm all in unlinked in and I think a lot of people go you know we should be across platforms and listen to that do you have any thoughts on that like how heavy do I go on LinkedIn versus the others well I think it depends on what you're selling first of all so I think in the B2B B2B yes I mean B2B all your decision makers are there if you are creating useful content as a business if like you're if your page is creating useful content they're gonna find that I'd also challenge you to as a leader as the celebrity CEO you're posting that stuff you're building a profile you're becoming that thought leader that subject matter expert by posting that same content and then to keep going the the companies that I see sell the best again are not just sales reps that she sell the best are not just running outbound cadences through LinkedIn email and calling it including LinkedIn on that they're also posting the content so if you want a good example you look at gong gong.io you look at their LinkedIn you look at their sales reps all their profiles are branded all they're all posting really helpful content and it's helpful content and it doesn't feel like it's like boilerplate copy it's actually useful stuff so it just means that higher really great people who want to build their own personal brand but they also want to use that to help them hit their sales numbers hit their meetings book hit their revenue targets whatever it is so I think that that comes from the CEO or the executive team leading because if I was a sales rep in a company in my own CEO didn't give two you know two shits about LinkedIn but he was saying or she was saying hey Scott I want you to keep posting I'd be like listen no I can't buy into this but if you see and this is all this this brings it back to activity-based management right how do you get somebody to buy into something well you show them how it helps them achieve their goals so if I'm trying to get a sales team to post on LinkedIn helpful content that I know my potential customer profile is going to find useful then I'm showing them how posting that content is going to make it easier to book demos to close deals and I think that's what you have to and why LinkedIn it's because all your decision makers are there all if you were selling if you were selling t-shirts I would say go to Etsy or go to Instagram but this is B2B does not D2C or B2C right we're selling B2B all your decision makers are there the targetings there the targeting is going to be better than any other social platform meaning I can drill down into whatever company profile size employee head count job position title role I can see if they just switched companies which could be a meaningful event for them to try and sell them a new product or service I can see the geographical region like the targeting is there the people are there and also on top of that it's a content efficient platform meaning I get the most organic reach out of any social maybe outside of TikTok meaning what does content efficient mean it means that there are more consumers content consumers people reading the content then content creators that is the opposite of Twitter Instagram Facebook because on all those platforms you have more creators and consumers so you don't get organic reach so when you post very few people see it unless you already have an audience on LinkedIn you can still post and tap into an audience because there's less people consuming than creating content so that's why for all those reasons I think it's a no-brainer to spend time on LinkedIn and to include that both on your outbound and just building a profile or a presence and then also creating more useful content for your actual company page and you know you know for those again listening saying you know don't necessarily just watch what Scott's saying watch what he does he's very active on LinkedIn very very educational polls engaging and then they get chosen by you know how many followers you have on LinkedIn what about sales enablement you know we talked video we talked about social selling you know with AI and all the automation now happening you know I got asked have speak with college group not that long ago and at the Q&A session at the end this is the graduating class one guy raised his hand he said to me Rick do you think sales people will exist in another three to five years and I was like question anyway let's talk automation not extinction yeah that's fair I think enablement tools in my opinion buyers are buyers are getting more complex they're doing more research they're doing more research before they actually even engage with a decision maker so it's making the sales reps job more complicated so I think that in my mind what enablement allows a sales rep to do is to focus more on the high value tasks so the actual live interaction the zoom calls or the sitting down for meetings if you know got from it that ever happens again grabbing a coffee with somebody I think that enablement is just removing the non the non-selling activities and I think that we've just crept crept crept with all the different ways that we record data the ways that we track and the things that we have to research and the amount that we have to research to differentiate ourselves from our competition all these different things that sales reps are now having to do just removes actual selling time actual sitting down and talking to somebody time which I think is why sales reps will never go away because as long as I can sit down and talk to you this way the way we're doing right now and I can help you see the context that you can't just get through reading information I think that that's going to be what's required and also building trust at the end of the day there has to be a trust component and I can't build trust easily if I've never seen you before spoken to you live I think that that's also why it brings back to video why do we use video to to build trust virtually so what is what a sales enablement sales enablement is giving people the tools to allow them to reduce their non-selling activity time so it could be using a CRM that allows them to automatically track data it could be using sales intelligence tools that allows them to better research customers like like an outreach or whatnot so they don't have to spend time looking all over the internet for information about this potential customer it could be trying to think what else it could be applied the other day just to think in there and it was a picture of frankenstein and it had all these different sales enablement platforms as different parts of the body because I think sales leaders business leaders are having a hard time tethering together what do I use for the arms what do I use for the legs what do I use for yeah I think it's a concern flex right there's a lot of great tools but tethering them together still seems to be an opportunity at least for me that's why I also think you need I think sales offices and emerging job role that has to be included because I think sales office is going to tie all these things together until they all play nice with each other because I mean even like a docu sign in my opinion or a doc send like docu sign allows you to expedite contrasting signing like all of these things like I don't need a sales or I remember when I first started to get a contract signed I would have to walk over to a fax machine and I would be like waiting in line for a fax machine because there was other sales reps using it and I'd be faxing or zero or scanning stuff at the send it over like how and then I have to literally receive the signed version and then counter sign it with a pen and then send it back like docu sign and I'm like that that can that can save me 20 minutes of dicking around at a copy machine like that's something to me that removes friction in the sales process so anything that removes non-selling time research increasing sales velocity helping the customers close a deal helping us track activities helping us even coach and train sales reps like gong is another one I like because it allows you to listen to calls but not have to listen to every call so it has an AI component that allows you to measure best practices for calls and it will it will provide you reports so you know where to look as opposed to you just spending two hours literally listening to recorded calls you now know which calls to look for and which reps potentially aren't saying the right thing or if a rep is speaking too much and you notice and the customer isn't speaking enough then it'll send you a report or an alert on that but that will expedite that learning process that you can actually drill down and even coach to that specific stress behavior as opposed to only finding it out two months later because you finally got a call where that rep was speaking for 95% of the call and you just realize that because you just missed all the other calls they had because you're just busy because you're a human right so you're you're reminding them by these sales manager you know you don't travel with this rep for a long time because you figured they're a 10-year grip and they know what to say and you get on the call after four months you're like oh my gosh you've been saying I don't know don't say that even on the training side Scott we've implemented a new platform where we can video capture a sales rep before they go through a program and then using AI we can pick up on key trigger words they're supposed to use boom then they go through the program we measure after so we're even using that now in the preparation not just the online but you know there's so many tools and I think it's there's more and more great once coming out your point about sales ops emerging I totally agree they need someone to kind of just make sure the engine and the air conditioning and everything's working right that's the biggest thing I think because there's so many like there's like there's like a thousand CRMs let alone yeah you've seen that I'm sure you've seen this chart there's like it's like the chart of like the sales sales tech chart and there's like a Mar tech chart and it's like thousands and thousands and thousands of apps so it's not it's just about knowing that this is something that you should dedicate somebody to go figure out that's really step one so I got a secret shortcut if anybody wants it just follow Scott Clary on LinkedIn trust me I follow the guy he's got great content it's totally educational he's very humble doesn't promote himself and that's probably why HubSpot selected him but hey Scott as I wrap up I just want to say thank you and congrats on what you're doing being a front runner I really appreciate the content you post your time today so team investors video okay get on it don't think about it anymore number two social selling you heard it from the master right here okay he's looking at a lot of companies that are doing great things and lastly sales enablement maybe you want to think about how you can frankenstein together something with a sales ops person so Scott thanks very much for joining us today buddy really appreciate it yeah like wise like wise you keep doing your thing Rick we'll do another one in a few months perfect everything will change by then thanks buddy exactly cheers bye thanks for joining us for this episode of this marketing show if you enjoyed today's show please like share and subscribe to get the latest b2b insights to help you market and sell to win