Just say no to the no content check in. We’re exploring adding value in your sales touch points on this episode of Closing Time. Hey everyone, and welcome to this episode of Closing Time. My name is Chip House CMO at Insightly. This is Closing Time, the show for go-to-market leaders. And I’m joined today by Jay Baer. Jay’s been called the world’s most inspirational customer experience and marketing keynote speaker. He’s the author of six bestselling books, a seventh generation entrepreneur and the founder of five multimillion dollar companies. Plus, he’s a certified Tequila sommalier and a lover of all things plaid. Welcome, Jay. Thank you, Chip. Fantastic to be on Closing Time. So, Jay, like many things in go-to-market, nobody wants to be a buyer when the salesperson is just emailing or calling for a check in. Right. So what’s your perspective? Yeah, I mean, nobody wants to buy. People want to have. Right. They prefer to skip the buying process entirely and just have the thing that they are trying to acquire. And the challenge is so often sellers and go-to-market specialists are almost on autopilot or frankly are on autopilot because the software says it’s time to send a note to the prospect. and so they send it out in the email and many times it’s an email or it might be a LinkedIn message or some such, but it essentially says, hey, knock, knock, knock. Do you remember that. I’m trying to get ahold of you? The ramifications of that are what you’re essentially saying to the prospect is, “Prospect, you’ve probably forgotten that I’m trying to sell to you.” And there is no way that’s true. And it’s not possible. They have not forgotten that you exist. They have not forgotten the deal. They have not. Like, I don’t know what happened.. I went on vacation. I forgot we were in the middle of this contract negotiation. It has nothing to do with their memory of your existence. There is some other reason they have put you on pause in sending an email or any other kind of touchpoint which just says checking in does nothing to solve that problem. All it does is annoy them. And the problem probably even gets more heightened downstream, doesn’t it, Jay? Right. When you’re moving from sales to marketing to customer success, when the outreach happens, right? There has to be some value or making it at least appear like you’ve done some work for the buyer. Yeah. I mean, look what is the argument that you should ever send something to a client or a prospective client that doesn’t contain value? I would love to know what the argument is. That that’s a good idea, right? We call that in the postal community, we call that junk mail, do we not? If you get something in your mailbox that doesn’t have value to you, you call it junk mail. And what do you do with it? You throw it away. You throw it away. Right. You throw it away. Right. And so but yet because it’s digital, because it’s an email message, or a LinkedIn message or a text message or whatever message, we don’t feel like it has to meet that same standard. And I think that’s a huge mistake. So what all go-to-market leaders should be striving for is a program and a process by which whomever it is that’s interacting with the customer or prospect, sales, marketing, customer support doesn’t matter. Any time anybody in your organization is interacting with a customer prospect, they should have a repository of value that they can draw from and send with that message. So the message is never just checking in. It’s, Hey, here’s an awesome thing I think you’d like. The client or prospective client will figure out, Oh yeah, we are overdue on that contract. You don’t need to tell them that. Just give them value and then let them connect the dots. Yeah. Makes good sense. And so what’s the solution there, Jay? Is it just engaging with the content that the marketing team has sent your way? Yes. Partially, Chip. I mean, it is disheartening to me how often salespersons are frankly not aware of what marketing has made. Right. And they say to marketing, hey, do we have something that I can send this prospect about topic X and marketing is like,. Yeah, bro, we’ve got like 14 white papers and three webinars and six podcasts on that topic and salesperson’s like, oh,. I had no idea. That drives me crazy. Right. To some degree,. I think sales does not work hard enough to really roll around in the marketing assets that exist by the same token, however, marketing is not very good in many cases at understanding the format of, of helpfulness and usefulness that sales actually needs a salesperson is not, unless it’s really, really deep in the consideration funnel, is not going to send a full length recorded webinar to a prospect. It’s like, hey, eat a four foot sandwich today, right? You’re like, what? Too much, right? So marketing’s got to get a lot better at taking their assets and breaking them down into small chunks that the client or prospect can consume in 3 minutes or less. This is what marketers are supposed to be good at. Right, Jay? I mean, we’re supposed to be good at communication. And the communication is not just to customers and potential customers. It’s also internally, frankly. Right. First, right. If you can’t get your own sales team locked and loaded and fired up and inspired by your content execution, why would customers be excited about it? Right. It starts at the inside out. In fact, when you and I work together at ExactTarget years and years and years ago, on Subscribers, Fans, & Followers series, that’s one of the things I think we really, really learned in that program was before you ever give it to a customer, make sure you give it to the sales team first. Get them super excited about it, and then once they’re excited, it’s amazing, then how much more lift it gets from the sales team when they take it to clients. Because sales got the first sort of bite of the apple. Jay, I’m glad that you brought up email in the olden days because to optimize an email, we used to talk about having to send an email that’s personal, it’s relevant, and it’s anticipated by the recipient. And so it’s no different for a salesperson, right? Yeah. I mean, look the worst thing to do is send an email that doesn’t say anything other than just checking it. Second worst thing to do is to send an email with some “content” that you think applies to all customers. Right? This is a thing that exists. That’s better than nothing, but it’s still not relevant. Obviously, the best approach is to say this particular piece of information or content, kind of micro content is really only of interest to this particular prospect. So I want to make sure that they get it. We’re at a place in marketing where Broad is flawed, and I find that fascinating because I’ve been doing this for 30 years and for almost the entirety of my career, it was the exact opposite. The goal of marketing was to reach as large of a potential addressable audience as possible. How many people can we reach? And now that is the wrong question to ask it. It’s how few people can we reach with the perfect message and all of the account based marketing trends and all of those kind of true one to one B2B marketing, it’s all possible now. But a lot of it is attitudinal, is making sure your go-to-market teams understand we have to treat each prospective customer as an audience of one and give them useful content accordingly. So one of the things that we didn’t think about, frankly, I don’t think in the olden days was the relevance around where the customer is in their journey with our organization. Right. And I mean, what’s your perspective on that and what the content marketing folks can do about that to help their sales team do a better job? Yeah, it’s one of the things that my consulting firm. Convince & Convert does with enterprise brands a lot, mostly in B2B, is to say, let’s map not just topics to funnel stage and sort of customer journey, but also modality to customer journey. So if you’re early in your consideration process, you’re going to prefer your content assets to be things like videos or articles or maybe even checklists as you get further down, you’re more interested in things like case studies and reports and configurators. And so you have to to tweak the format of what you’re giving your go-to-market team based on where that particular customer is and how close they are to actually making a purchase. There’s a lot of interesting research on this as well that illustrates how different people prefer different content at a different point of the journey. Furthermore, Chip, as we’re now in a really, truly a multi-generational go-to-market environment where you’re selling to boomers, you’re selling to Gen X, you’re selling to millennials, and in some cases you’re selling to Gen Z. They have very different preferences for content format. We’re talking about email, the New York. Times, did this amazing research last year where they interviewed college students about email marketing and sort of email in general. And I remember it vividly. One of the quotes from a college student was, “every time I receive an email, it feels like I’m being stabbed, it’s just another thing to do.” And that’s amazing, right? But we are so reliant on email in a lot of B2B go-to-market environments and maybe we should rethink that at least at some level. Right? So it’s not just about generating content, it’s about picking the right medium as a go-to-market team to really engage the people you’re trying to sell. And if it’s Gen Z, maybe you need more video. Precisely or even earlier in the funnel stage, more video, even if it’s not Gen Z, one of the things that I would want to use Insightly for is, to track that as early in the relationship as possible. You can give a prospect content in different formats. Here’s the article, here’s the video, here’s the puppet show of the same thing, and then you see which one they actually interact with. And you log in the CRM. This person is pro puppet show and then every time that you interact with them thereafter, it’s a puppet show because they’ve basically told you with their behavior, what content format you like. That’s not that hard. But yet very few people do it. You know, I have to say, Jay, as you know, we’re doing video. It’s kind of meta. We’re doing it right now, but we are not doing any puppet shows at the time. That’ll be Closing Time 2.0. Will be a series of puppet shows about go-to-market excellence. I can’t wait. Exactly. Well, Jay, do you have any final thoughts on how sales people can make the most out of the content? Yeah, I mean, two things. One, be really good about interacting with marketing and saying we love that you did this 37 page report, but can I have that in ten two paragraph chunks, right? Taking your big assets and atomizing them into small assets. That’s really the key here. And then making sure that you’re being as relevant, personalized and customized as possible when you’re associating those content snacks with the outreach. Snackable content. You heard it from Jay Baer. Thanks again, Jay. My pleasure. Great to see you. Yeah, and thanks to all of you for watching today’s episode of Closing Time, the show for go-to-market leaders. Just tick the subscribe button, then click the bell so you don’t miss any episodes and we’ll see you next time.
