The Top Sales & Marketing Trends of 2021 w/ The SMarketing Show by In2Communications #scottsthoughts

Welcome to Success Story, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host, Scott, and today you are going to hear me on the marketing show. They asked me to come on and speak about the top sales and marketing trends of 2021. I hope you enjoy. Hi, Rick Lambert. Welcome to this marketing show. Our first of the year in 2021. We got a great guest today. And let me tell you, I was on LinkedIn one day a while ago and I looked at this guy's post. Scott's post. I thought, wow, this guy gets it. Then by the third and by around the 100th post I read it is. I thought, this guy really understands sales and marketing alignment. He lives it every day. Great ideas. If you're not following on LinkedIn, I think you should after today's program to say the least. And then I looked, he's got over 104,000 followers on LinkedIn. So I knew I wasn't the only one. Scott, thanks so much for joining us today. Maybe you could let the folks know kind of what you do because you, as I said before this, you kind of get a rubik's cube all over in terms of sales and marketing. But I really think you get what's going on. Yeah, for sure. And thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. It's a very, very kind intro. If you look at my LinkedIn, I'm doing a lot of stuff and I do that on purpose. Like I like to keep myself busy. But I'm in terms of my nine to five right now. If you look at my LinkedIn, you'll see two companies, Excitem and Grass Valley. So Excitem is an OEM for Grass Valley. I'm in charge of all sales and marketing for the software products that Excitem creates. So Grass Valley has about 100 sales reps for the channel partners globally. And I take the SaaS products to market through Grass Valley. So we're a lot of different hats by nine to five. Outside of that, I host a podcast called Success Story Podcast, where I just interview a ton of incredible, interesting people. And we can talk a little bit about why I started that. And then I also run a publication called ROI Overload, which is basically just people who have insights into sales and marketing, talking about strategies, case studies as what they've seen work. And hopefully that will help build a community and educate others. So that's sort of the gamut of what I do. And I enjoy all things, like you said, sales and marketing, I nerd out like that. So I'm excited to get it. Well, thank you so much. It is a pleasure to have you, Scott. And obviously over 100,000 people following on LinkedIn tells me that you're relating a relevant message at the right time to people. And they're reading everything that you're delivering. And obviously it's very strategic as well in terms of the content that you're posting. We're going to talk about coming up your Success Story Podcast and also YouTube videos because you're doing a lot of video with that too. So I want to kind of pick your brain on a few things that you've done that I've seen which have been great. But thank you for joining us. Our topic today overall is three trends that you're seeing when it comes to marketing and sales as we head into 2021. So we just want to kind of get your perspective on what you're seeing. And I guess we'll start we'll start in the sales world. Sorry, Scott. So I mean, if I have a sales rep today B2B, we're talking I feel after 2020 I just came out of a drier cycle, right? I have no idea where I came from where I'm going. And I'm talking in general here. But can you talk what what are you seeing out there that's working? And if there were three trends again, as Cheryl mentioned, what do you suggest people consider in 2021? So okay, so three trends for sales in particular. First one would be sales engagement. So what that means it's a relatively new trend. It's using tools like like sales loft or outreach to have to spend less time with the admin tasks or the research tasks associated with outbound sales and to spend more time crafting meaningful messages and getting in front of clients. So when you do whenever you do sales, there's always the battle between automation versus personalized personalization. And I think that automation is unfortunately what people default to just because they don't have the time or the energy to do the research that true good personalization in sales requires. So tools like sales loft or outreach, what they allow you to do is spend more time actually getting in front of clients that are your ideal customer profile or your buyer persona and allow you to spend less time doing the research because they sort of bring in the right things and the right facts. So when you do the outreach and you craft the emails that are really just the why you why now, you can really personalize those and get in front of the right people and get more response from the people that you actually want to get in contact with. So I'd say sales engagement is probably the way to sell in 2021 because it allows you to sell with speed and velocity plus personalization. I think a lot of sales people understand the concept of personalization, but what you're talking about is adding some wheels underneath their cart so they can do more of it, scale it and really become more top of mind at the point and need more conversation. So I'm an agreement 100% with that. What else do you think in their sky? So other other things and you'll see that this is something you know you mentioned my LinkedIn. So I've built a LinkedIn profile but social selling. So not just LinkedIn, LinkedIn works because it's a B2B social platform is probably the best B2B social platform but social selling. So building out a brand based on what you're selling based on who you are as an individual and then using social media to connect with decision makers and actually sell on social. Now how do you sell on social? Well, you don't just go into everyone's DMs on Twitter or LinkedIn or whatnot. You have to build a brand, you have to continuously create content that positions you as a subject matter expert and then you build that level of trust. You're putting out content that's useful, it's educational, it's targeted and it's answering questions that your potential buyer would be asking. That's your content strategy for social selling and now after you put out a couple hundred, a couple thousand pieces of content, now people recognize you as I hate the word but it's true that the thought leader, the subject matter expert and that's true social selling. So by the time that you reach out to them, they already know your name. And there's a couple people doing this very, very well on LinkedIn. Not just executives or CEOs but SDRs, AES that you can social sell at any level and I think it's a really powerful tool. I feel like that's a whole that's a whole show in itself. I don't know if you've noticed this. Yes, I agree. Lots of people are doing that very well. It's just, you know, basically offering the solution to whatever problem your clients or your customers might have. But I've noticed in the last 12 months, maybe 10 months, the amount of in-mail selling that I am getting sponsored, whatever it might be, I call it spam, has literally quadrupled in the last 10 months. Imagine if it's from me versus exactly. So if you've seen my stuff, and I don't want to be pretentious, but if you've seen my stuff for a long time, then when I message you on LinkedIn, you're like, oh, I'm going to, I'm interested now at least. I might just have a conversation. I might jump on a Zoom call, whatever, because I've been putting out content for two years that you keep seeing on your feed and you keep, and he keeps resonating with you, right? That's social selling. People get the wrong, people get the wrong idea about social selling because they think that social selling just means spamming on LinkedIn. That's not social selling. That's spamming on LinkedIn, like you said, and that's still very negative. People don't like that. You don't have castle and GDPR and all these different anti-spam laws, just to move it and pivot it from email to a social platform. That's not going to accomplish anything. But if a good SEO strategy, we're not getting to market, but a good SEO strategy is to answer, you do your keyword search to answer the questions that your customers are asking. You answer those questions on your website, right? That's going to index your website for the right questions that people are asking. Well, you take that strategy and build it into your content. What are your questions asked? What questions are your customers asking? You just answer those in your posts, in your videos, in whatever you're putting on social, and that will build that cloud and that level of respect on social media. Scott, it's so basic what you're saying. I don't mean to minimize it, but people want to make it more complicated that it is, and it's not email prospecting. We launched a program called the 30-day LinkedIn Bootcamp last year. We'll set a record this month in January, just because people are awakening to the power of social. I think if sales teams watching right now, leaders, just wrote down the top 10 questions your customers are asking and get your reps to answer that on a video. You will exponentially position yourself in your market. I mean, sometimes they just got to jump in the swimming pool like I use that analogy all the time. Just do it, and you'll see the results right away. Sorry, what was the great point there? Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's a good point too, and just get them to do it. One successful strategy that I saw, I can't remember which company, but they basically built a Slack channel that was focused on amping each other up and pushing each other to post on LinkedIn more. Then when somebody put a post, you could drop that link to the Slack chat that everyone else in the company would like it, and they'd also critique it and give feedback, and that's just one way, right? Just a channel in your company that promotes social selling or social media or posting more often, and not everyone's going to be comfortable day one, but you start to get that built into the culture of your company, and it'll pay off in six months or nine months or a year or whatever. We've kind of made it into a bit of a game with some of our clients where we actually create a leaderboard. Then we call it the Rackenstack where all the reps are actually rated on a monthly basis as to how much activity they had, how much content they posted, and then they get called out if they don't. And like you said, yeah, they're not always comfortable in the beginning, but there's also incentives to this. So if you're in the green zone because you've posted eight times or you shared content this amount of time, you get entered into a draw or you win something or there's some sort of incentive attached to it. So that's worked well for a lot of our clients and for some newer reps as well. Yeah, yeah, very good. Your third point with sales, yeah. Third point is not a 2021 thing, but it's a thing that people don't do enough. So I'm going to bring it up again, 2021. It's bringing in feedback from your customers and building that into your sales messaging. So this structure or this process sits in different parts of the company, depending on your company. So it could sit in marketing. It could sit in sales options. It could sit in sales, depending on who's initiating it. But the goal is to take the feedback from your customers. So when you sell a product, have an exit interview with your customer, not an exit interview, but a post sales interview asking them, why did they buy? Because the second somebody buy something, that's probably the highest chance that they're going to agree to actually sit down with you and talk to you. When a customer doesn't buy something is not a very good chance that they're going to talk to you, although it would be nice to figure out why they didn't buy. It's probably a little bit easier to interview your customers. The second they sign that contract, ask them why they buy. They're going to tell you why they buy, take that messaging. Literally the words that they say, and you build that into your sequences, you build that into your customer conversations, you build that into even the copy on your website. So the reason why people buy your product may not be exactly why you think people buy your product. And the verbiage and the way they word the reason as to why they bought their product, that's what you have to use in your sales sequencing. Because you can guarantee if somebody said, I bought it because of X, then there's going to be another customer that's going to buy it for the exact same reason. So it's just simple things. Just understand your customer more and build that into your outbound. Great, great point. Scott, we are as traditional salespeople are coached to ask why we lost the business, but too few to your point, I think asked why they won. And I always joke with reps, you know, you can't maybe do a great at the moment they sign and ask, you know, why you have to buy from us, almost like you're surprised, but at the appropriate time, because you know, we get all the information from marketing saying why our product is the best, but what the customer sees is probably very valuable in this world of commoditization to help you differentiate yourself in the next deal. Great point, love it, love it. And I also think that it's probably a learning moment for the business because they might actually learn something about why this client is onboarding with them. And it might be something different than what they say. Like you said, oftentimes product and service is a commodity. So what is it that made them actually take that next step to a purchase? Okay, so let's shift the conversation a little bit, Scott, and get into the marketing world a little bit. I'd love to kind of pick your brain and see some of the trends that you're seeing this year and have some conversations around that. So what's the biggest trend that you're seeing in 2021? So, okay, so I'm not saying this is the biggest trend, but I'm saying it's a highly effective trend. So my first marketing point is last year, I spoke a lot about the celebrity CEO and why that was important for a company. Let me explain what that means. So if you look at, for example, a very large example, this would be Elon Musk who has something like 42 million followers on Twitter versus Tesla that has 7 million followers. If Elon Musk wants to launch a new product, he just tweets about it and he can go launch a new product. That's no problem at all because he has a celebrity persona. So I always advocated for CEOs to really put themselves out into public, but I sort of advocated for them to do after they built the product, and then they wanted to take that product to market. So now fast forward to 2021, a popular topic or a popular way to market a new business or an existing business is to build it in public. What does that mean? You are quite literally putting yourself out there and talking about the milestones, the setbacks, the accomplishments, the new releases. And it's all coming from hopefully a senior executive at the company because it adds a level of personalization that you can't really get if you're coming from a logo. But one good example of this, for example, Paul Yucubian, he built a company called copy.ai. He started, well, he started previous, but when he started building in public, what I mean by that, he started tweeting and putting out content about where his company was, it was at zero, zero dollars MRR. Fast forward six months, he's now at 30,000 MRR exclusively from, not exclusively, but the majority of it coming from building in public. So him constantly talking about new releases, setbacks, going into the community on Twitter, mostly for this one, and asking people what they thought about the product. He's been building everything that he's done, every single release, every single thing he's done, he's been putting it in public. And I think that that's taking the authenticity of that celebrity CEO and bringing it to a much earlier stage. It's not a comfortable thing for a lot of people, but I find it in 2021 being vulnerable and putting yourself out there only rewards you because you have, especially early stage companies or smaller companies that are really struggling, people reward effort. And they reward putting yourself out there. So I think that I've seen that happen a few times with smaller CEOs. And I think that that's something that is a little bit out of the box in terms of like marketing strategy. But if you can put yourself out there and you can build a community, which is going to lead into my next point, I think that's something that can be extremely impactful for your business. So what about the business? It's risky for sure, but we always know that with every reward, there tends to be a risk associated with that. What about the businesses that don't necessarily have those celebrity CEOs, but they have those staple leaders that have been within the organization for many, many years. How do you get them to take those risks and come out and start having conversations about some of the changes that they might be making when it comes to their product or service? So that's a good question. The second gentleman I mentioned, Paul, he was not a celebrity. Nobody knew who he was. He just started putting stuff out there saying, hi, I'm the CEO of this. And this is my product. And this is what it does. And this is what I hope into accomplish. And these are, you know, this is what we've done in the past six months. This is what I'm hoping to do the next six months. He was not a, he was not a celebrity, excuse me. So he just started putting himself out there. So how do you, how do you do that? I think you have to as, well, this is a tough question because there are people that that will always get social media. But if you look at the B2B marketing landscape, the majority of CEOs don't get social media. You can look at it because the majority of B2B marketing sucks from, from small companies all the way to Fortune 100, the B2B marketing frankly sucks. Like for a lot of companies. So, you know, I think that I think that what it is is more if you are, if you are, you know, looking to work with a company, I think you want to probably audit where you're going to end up a little bit ahead of time. So this is not going to apply for, you know, companies over 50 million plus who've been setting their ways for a long time, right? If they've set their ways, they're probably not going to pivot. If you have a conservative CEO that's never had social media, it's been in the business for like 30, 40 years. It's very hard to change their opinion about social. But I think that if you are maybe younger in your career or if you're looking to change jobs or, you know, change, change companies, just look for signs that they are building in public or they are at least comfortable with social media or because it gives you a sense of does a CEO get marketing? Does a CEO get the current marketing landscape, right? I think that that's very important and I think that I think that's going to be more of a factor in what determines success. If a CEO gets social, if a CEO gets modern marketing versus what it was in the past. I like it as a marketer because it makes them somewhat accountable for the various milestones that we're working towards and we're trying to market. So moving on to your second point, and I like this one, all around podcasts, and I have some other questions for you as well. But why are you seeing podcasts as such a big trend this year? So all of my marketing points involve removing the corporate veil. That's all three. So, you know, that building in public, removing that corporate veil, putting that CEO or executive out there, podcasts. What is that doing? Well, it's creating content that's a very easy to create a podcast, right? It's not hard. There's a load barrier to entry to create a podcast, but it's creating content that you're putting yourself out into the world. So it could be an executive for a company. There's going to be somebody who's going to be doing those interviews. There's going to be somebody who's actually creating that content. So I think that creating podcasts is just another way for people to consume a message from a company that isn't through traditional B2B marketing. Now there's other benefits to podcasts. So when you actually structure a podcast, I'm sure one of your follow-up questions is how do you structure a podcast properly in the B2B space? But you want to do it so that the podcast is targeted that it's interviewing your ideal customer profile and your buyer persona. And you are getting them to answer questions again that other customers who you would want to sell to would be asking. So that's how you that's how you build a B2B podcast. That's going to do two things for you. First of all, you're going to create content. You're going to have an individual that's creating a content. So again, that personalization or that authenticity from the brand remove the corporate veil. You are and then you are interviewing all of these subject matter experts and your answering questions, which is going to create useful content for other people that you want to sell to. And actually a third point would be now you're actually creating relationships with all these decision makers that you could also sell to by giving them a forum or an outlet to chat with you on. You know, when we have these conversations like if I was trying to sell you something and you were my target customer profile after a 30 minute or 45 minute conversation, like all of a sudden we have a relationship that I can't I can't get that through an email. I can't get that through a LinkedIn DM. So there's a lot of benefits but I think that that's something that companies really have to consider and you see a lot of forward thinking companies that sort of like I say get marketing. You see them doing it in 2021 or 2021, 2021, right? So a really big marketing trend in 2021 is sort of multi-channel influencer marketing and also video which I know we're going to talk about. So success story podcast which you're doing. I love them. I watched a couple of Vernon Walsh ones. You had a few on there former NFL player talked about how he sort of pivoted from being a professional athlete into what he's doing now after retirement. How do you find these guys? So the thing for me is I love what they're saying. I love the fact that you're focusing entirely on their story, their lessons, what they've learned and what they can bring to the table. But I find sometimes people are reluctant to share that and the individuals that you think would have the most impact on content aren't always accessible. So how do you find these guys and how do you sort of introduce yourself and get them involved? Sure. So first you have to build a concept or some sort of concept as to what you want your podcast to accomplish. So when you look at my podcast, my podcast is focused on unpacking playbooks and delivering lessons of incredible people. And I will see saw back and forth between industry. So you have your executive CEOs, entrepreneurs, founders, but then you also have people that have just been highly successful in other aspects of their life. And that was done on purpose because I didn't want to have just another entrepreneur or sales or marketing podcast. I wanted to add a little bit of flavor and with that flavor comes a little bit of cloud, right? That's also a big thing when you bring in some celebrity. So that was my purpose. My podcast would not work well as an exclusively B2B podcast focused on selling a product because right like Vernon or even like Anthony Scaremucci, Guy Cowell Socket, these are not people that really will answer questions that my potential ideal customer profile or target customer profile will have. However, for me, this works with the podcast that I wanted to build out. How do I reach these people? Well, I generally just do a traditional outbound sales campaign that I would for selling two C-suite to these influencers. So what you do is you just figure out who you want to reach out to. You can use tools to uncover their email address. There's a million and one tools to find somebody's email address is really not hard. And then you're just doing the why you, why now? That's probably the classic strong email, like outbound email sequence. So why, why am I actually reaching out to this individual? Why do I want to have you on my show? And then why now? Why is it relevant for you to be on my show now? And then you also showcase the benefit that the show would bring them. So you're reinforcing the personalization for me doing the outbound or the outreach to them. But then I'm also showcasing the community that they'd have access to the other individuals that have been on the show. These stories they've told. And of course, like, you know, the engagement or the, you know, the total followers, total downloads. These are the important metrics for podcasts. So I want to make it personalized and then showcase the benefit. And it's just it's the same stuff that you do for like selling a product or a service. I'm just doing it selling a podcast. But that's it. That's really it. So that's that's a really good point. I'm I'm giving a shout out to to Tessa Virtue who I'm trying to get on the show. She's an Olympic medalist figure skater. She's you know, doing some really great things out there when it comes to like female leadership. And trying to really promote, you know, females in leadership roles. So this is my my step to of trying to get her on the show for sure. Okay, point number three. I want to talk about your third trend that you're seeing, which I think is something that we've been talking about for a few years now. But it just it's there for a reason. And it doesn't go away. And that's a video. Yeah. So again, sort of on that theme of putting yourself out in front of your customers, video is an incredibly powerful way to do that. Right. So it's taking, you know, it's most people just communicate via text, emails, you have copy on your web, taking a step further. You're doing a podcast and people are listening to your voice, they're listening to how, you know, how you converse with other individuals, you're having conversations, taking a step further. Now video, right. So your face is on screen. And video can be done in a variety of ways. Video can be done in outbound sales. You can use Vidyard. You can use video for LinkedIn outbound. But you can also use video on social media. You can use video and you know, create a YouTube channel. AA Trefs does a great job of building out a YouTube channel that's all video again, answering customer's questions. So any customer they think would use AA Trefs, they built out a YouTube channel answering customer's questions in the SEO and web space. And all of their videos are just sort of tutorials that their customer would probably want to watch. But what it does is it again, it removes the corporate veil and it adds a level of humanity and personalization to the messaging and the content. And I think that videos even more important in 2021 because we are all remote. We're all stuck at home. And all we crave is to connect with another human. And the best way, the only way to do that right now, the most effective way to do that right now is for most of us through video. So if you can include video, people can see who I am, what I sound like, what I look like, how I conduct myself, how I, you know, my hand gestures and all that, everything, all the nuances that you would normally get from somebody who would, you know, you sit across a table with them and you grab a bunch of your coffee, you can't do that right now. So you can do that at scale with video. And I think that if you can, if you can get comfortable with video, which is, you know, just do it, just do it, do it, do it, record yourself, record yourself, you're going to hate your own voice, you're going to hate the way you look, hate the way you sound, but you do it enough. And first of all, you realize that, you know, everyone, no one really cares what you look like or what you sound like, people just care about the message and the content and how you can help them. That's really it at the end of the day. And once you get that through your mind and you get over yourself, basically, putting in videos, one of the best ways to build relationships with somebody online at scale without ever meeting them in person. So I think that's very important as well. Cheryl, I know he's talking to the converted here. It's just for some reason. People hit a wall. And, you know, when I started to follow your content to your point, I felt like I knew you. And, you know, for all the things that video offers beyond text or images. And we're big fans of video. We just see it so underutilized. And the entry point is so low right now with a smartphone. And, you know, what would you do when I do on LinkedIn and Cheryl does? We just sitting at a huge opportunity for 2021. Thank you, by the way, for sharing these practical, you know, things today. You know, a lot of times people talk 30,000 foot. I think you're talking a lot of immediately implementable things that would make a big difference from the moving the needle this year. Can I give you, can I give you one more for video that sort of changed the way that I do video? It's made it super easy. So if you want to record video and you don't want to spend a lot of time editing, which is the most difficult thing to do. Let's talk about social video, okay? Because that's it is, you know, in the marketing realm, obviously, you're creating content on social. So my process for video is either record on a phone or record on a webcam. And then I have a file. I throw that file into a program. This is an unsponsored shout out called time bolt. T-I-M-E-B-O-L-T. It truncates and removes all the silence automatically. So it saves me about two hours of editing with the click of a button. And then I take that truncated video. And I throw it into another tool on iPhone right now, only called a memory. And what that does is it creates the Gary V style videos pre-formatted with the text on top and the automatically generated subtitles on the bottom. And then you can throw in some, you know, some design or some emojis or whatever you want there. But that's my, that's literally my video process. And it lets me create video in, you know, I can create a social piece in 15 minutes versus if I had to edit it and do the subtitles on my own and do the, all the editing on my own and get like Premiere Pro, it would take like an hour and a half two hours. So that, so video, time bolt, family is probably the easiest workflow that I found for social video at least or otherwise. But that's a, that's a, hopefully a really, you know, day one take away. The people can go start creating video easily. If you're watching right now, this Scott's demonstrating why I follow this guy online because he gives it immediately applicable ideas that are not commonly known. And I appreciate that you're posting online, buddy. I'll continue to follow you. And there's a reason over 100,000 do I know I'm linked in. Cheryl, I don't know if you had any else that around how people can turn to the way this year. No, I, I just wanted to say thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. I still have lots of questions, which means we're going to have to bring you back. I definitely want to talk about your branding. Your branding is on point. And, you know, it's impressive. And, you know, you gave us some of the tools that you use, which is always helpful. And I think it takes the scariness out of the video aspect a little bit. And I know we always try to encourage people that are going to start doing video just to practice, practice on the in front of a mirror, practice on your phone and just get used to seeing yourself. And it'll be a little bit less scary. I really encourage everyone to check out your podcast, which is success story. And there's some really good stories out there. You can go to your website, which is scottdclarry.com. You can find the link to all the information about your podcast and your YouTube channel. You can sign up for the newsletter there as well. The success story. It's amazing. Thank you so much. I encourage all our viewers to watch and listen to that. So thank you so much for coming on today. Scott, it was a pleasure. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. We'll see everybody on the marketing show. Thanks for tuning in everybody. Thanks for kicking it off in a big way, buddy. We appreciate having you. I appreciate it. It'd be tough to follow this show. I'll tell you that. No, no, no, no. You give me too much credit, but I appreciate this opportunity. Thank you.