Episode 160: Role of Sales in Demand Gen with Andrei & Vladimir

In this episode of Full-Funnel Live, Vlad and Andrei break down how sales can stop blaming marketing for a lack of awareness and inbound pipeline, and take an active role.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗬𝗼𝘂’𝗹𝗹 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻:
•⁠ ⁠Why modern sales teams actively participate in demand generation (and what that looks like in practice)
•⁠ ⁠How sales can create awareness among target accounts
•⁠ Allbound demand capture playbooks •⁠ ⁠Concrete examples of non-sales touches that actually drive conversations 

💡 As always, we shared real examples, ready-to-use activities, and a fresh view on how sales and marketing can partner to generate AND capture demand—together.


RESOURCES

On-Demand B2B Marketing Courses: https://fullfunnel.io/b2b-marketing-courses/

Full-Funnel Insider - A Marketing Newsletter For B2B Marketers: https://fullfunnel.io/marketing-newsletter/

Join our community for B2B marketers - The Trenches: https://trenches.community/

Upcoming events: https://lu.ma/fullfunnel/events Full-Funnel Marketing Content Hub: https://fullfunnel.io/blog

Vladimir on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladimirblagojevic/
Andrei on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azinkevich/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
This is the Full Funnel BTP Marketing podcast, brought to
you by full Funnel Dot Yo.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Let's start. Hello everyone, welcome back to the Full Final Life.
I forgot what is the episode? Is the row we have?
But I bet it's one hundred and sixty or something.
Crazy to realize how many episodes we have done so
far and that the majority of these episodes were actually

(00:34):
the live podcast episodes with you guys, our community. Let
us know, I know, we'll already a couple of people
joining us live. Let us know, guys where you're all
joining us from. And meanwhile, with the agenda for today
today has promised we're going to chat about role of

(00:54):
sales in demand generation. Not the most overt topic, right
because quite often the first perception will be like why
sales should be involved in demand gen? Right? Completely different functions,
completely different departments. But as you know, we always promote
and evangelize the cross functional collaboration, which means that every

(01:20):
creates awareness, everybody creates demand, everybody creates pipeline, everybody works
on activation. Right. This is the team sport, and today
we want to show with you what exactly sales should
be in charge when it comes to demand generation or
how they could work with marketers on generating demand. Love

(01:43):
has prepared all some dequistants of examples, so I think
from that point we can kick it off and yeah,
pass on mic to your left.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Thank you. Before we jump in into the examples, I
wanted to just very briefly highlight this model that you
see here on the screen. It's too small to read,
which is perfect. I just wanted to give an overview
of the different activities that we believe or the different

(02:14):
key pillars that we believe any demand generation programs should have.
And the first one is brand awareness. We know that
it's very important for sales, especially to create that brand
awareness because if you are unknown, it's very hard for
sales to get the response they lose out on brand.

(02:38):
There are many different reasons why you want the buyers
to be aware, but essentially we know that buyers, actually
even most buyers will pre select vendors that they are
aware of, especially in large companies. So brand awareness is important.
And we're going to talk about how can sales but

(03:00):
disipating bread awareness, then the demand generation itself creating demand,
educating buyers about solutions to their problems, how our product
is different than worth buying, and from the sales perspective,
actually also warming up the let's say, the buying committee

(03:22):
and preparing them. Excuse me, there is some noise coming
from the outside. I need to close my millions. That
is the other part. So generating amount for your product
and a lot of these activities from marketing and that
are done through messaging and content. So we need to
make sure that this messaging content is actually reaching our

(03:44):
target buyers, our buying center through distribution, so that's kind
of in the middle. We need to make sure the
distribution s sales also plays a role there. And finally,
demand capture. You want to capture the demand that you've
generated to freeze, not to leave the money on the table,
and that's obviously also where sales can play a round.

(04:05):
And these are traditionally in most companies, all of these
activities attritionally pure marketing activities. So that out of the way,
I think we can jump in in each of these
key pillars and see how sales should actually contribute. And
the first one is brand awareness. So Andrew, maybe you

(04:26):
can jump into brand awareness and share what the goals
the metrics are, and then we can share some examples there.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
I know you clicked on the slide, but I wanted
to ask everybody here one question. If we apply account
based philosophy right and in bit of the market, and
honestly almost ever sent as account based, right, we just
need to focus on our best accounts. Question to you guys,

(04:57):
who has the best ex to target audience? To target accounts?
Question in the chat? Let us know police who has
the best access to target audience? Who is communicating with
them on a regular basis, likely daily. This is our
sales team, right, So obviously exactly so if we if

(05:25):
we look from the perspective of generating demand, right, we
have ads, We create content, we run events. For what reason?
We want to make sure that our target accounts see
our product, become curious, learn about this product, understand the
value right, understand the benefits of our product, and potentially

(05:50):
consider us. So if we look overs we have ads
right and adds a small, less controllable channel, right, we can,
especially if we're talking about linkedn and for example, we
can so like the accounts we want to target, we
can set up the precise job, role, job titles, targeting,

(06:10):
et cetera. Right, So there are plenty of opportunities. But
outside ads, what other best channels we have? And in reality,
these are the sales networks, because sales are building these
networks every single day. Some of them do it in
a bad way, in a bad manner just pen and
everybody right and linked in and via email. Some of

(06:33):
them do it in a meaningful way, mapping out the
band commuters of their strategic accounts, engaging, building the relationship,
et cetera. Right, But where I'm leading with this, the
key point is that we want to make sure that
we'll leverage our best channel. And Now, if you guys

(06:55):
have ever interw to your sales reps about about the
sales process challenges that they face in the sales process,
I bet that if you have ever done this. If no,
I highly recommend you to do this.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
Do this.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
Just just schedule this call with your sales team. You'll
benefit a lot from this. Ask this, what are the
what are the main challenges in your sales processes you
guys face where the biggest drop offs? Quite often you'll
hear the lack of awareness in strategic accounts. Now, follow
up with the second question, what can maximize your chances

(07:36):
that they will reply back to you? And quite often
you'll hear they know me, they had prior engagement with us,
they are connected to our clients, or they are connected
to some of our partners. For example, Oh, we have
a valuable information that we can share with them. Right,

(07:56):
that's the key. So from that perspective, that means that
we need to enable our sales teams to help with
this valuable information so they could maximize their chances. And
next we need to help them to create the visibility
so they become a known person. But none for what
known for Spie and everybody right with like endless cad

(08:19):
and says, Hey, I just wanted to check in. It
seems that you didn't treat my message. So I just
wanted to check in. I just wanted to check in
last time. But no, I will just fallow up on
e mail just the last check in, otherwise I'm going
to unsubscribing from my sequence. Right, do we want our
sales reps being known for this or do we want
to be known as the experts in our industry? People

(08:42):
who can help, people who can advise. So yesterday I
was on another interw and we chatted a little bit
about sales decades ago, Right, there were no junior BDRs
or business development managers. This was the can sell tis.
The sales process was consultative, so these people were having

(09:04):
the domain knowledge. Right, So the same man set we
need to even if we have now junior res jars
because that could have a question, but what to do
if we have You need to train them and you
need to supply them with this industry information so they
could create this visibility, they could create this awareness, they
could generate demands, right, and the key goal is that

(09:25):
we want to position them as the trusted advisors, as
industry expert, as consultants, because there is a simple truth,
no single buyer loves to hang out with drs. If
you don't believe me, just reach out to any senior
person that your sales reps are targeted and ask, hey,

(09:46):
do you guys love to you know when our business
development managers pick up your brains and qualify you for
twenty thirty minutes trying to validate what I need, I
guess you're rarely positive replies, right. So what we want
to make sure is that we enable our sales reps
to be perceived as industry experts, so they have they

(10:09):
create the visibility and that's also this is the process
that helps to create the print visibility right, And they
have reply rates, the connection requests accepted, their messages or
emails are saving the replies and these are the metrics
that we usually track account engagement and response rates. So

(10:29):
that was kind of a brief. Let's say zoomen from
our collateral, just to give more perspective on print awareness.
But I touched a couple of points, so again passing
mic back to your lad. So let's make sure the key.

Speaker 1 (10:44):
Pillars absolutely so, how can sales participate in creating brand awareness?
Content as always is one of the key pillars and
the sales carric purpose and share expertise content from the
on social profiles if the buyers are on socially directing
on social which is the case and a lot of

(11:07):
case in a lot of cases, which is through in
a lot of cases, and are shared in a moment
what to do when this is not the case. But
I would also add one more thing here is that
they should also share insights about target accounts with marketing.
Like Andrey asked at the beginning of this podcast, you

(11:28):
know who has the most contact with the target accounts
with the target buyers. Yes, it's sales obviously also the
CS customer success. So they are the source of information
in a lot of cases, the source of information when
it comes to insights about those target accounts. What are

(11:49):
the challenges, priorities, et cetera. Why is that important? Because
if you're going to base your content on these insights,
is going to resonate more and like and Andrew, Andrew
mentioned as well, the best way to support sales is
with something valuable that they can share. So a very
good litmus test where any piece of content is would

(12:12):
a VP of sales share this piece of content with
a strategic target with a decision maker or target buyer
at a strategic target account. And the best way to
guarantee that is if you're creating a content based on
those insights. So a long winded way to say, we
can support sales with content or input for content, I'll

(12:35):
share also some other ways in which they can maybe
repurpose some of the content themselves. And as you can see,
this was a fantastic example here where sales have shared
a piece of content actually quite quickly produced together and
got an enormous awareness of the target aunts exactly the

(13:01):
kind of people and companies that they were after. So
that's why content content helps you create that trusted advisor
perception rather than yet another sales rep. Content on social
especially also lends itself to outreach. You know you're engaging

(13:21):
with my content, I can reach out to and start
a conversation about the topic that this content piece was about, etc. Et.
Many good reasons to do that. When it comes to content,
I always ask I would ask myself or you know,
in your team, I would ask these questions, how can
we as marketing support sales with content creation? Why? Because

(13:42):
like we recently had under summit a group of salespeople
from our clients, I think it was three different clients
and we ran around table and when we ask them
about what they appreciated the most as support during the
Avian programs, they ran internally from their marketing team, everybody

(14:04):
was talking about content first. So content is really the
biggest way in which we can support something valuable for
them to share. And I would also ask, okay, are
there any quote unquote easy wins or something that maybe
sales can even prepare themselves or can repurpose themselves. And

(14:28):
there are things like you know what we call permissions
call creation where you can like. Also, they can just
leverage existing content from fol leaders in the industry, et cetera.
But the even more interesting question is what types of
content helps start conversations and the two types of content
that we love are the so called account love letters

(14:53):
and content collaborations. By account love letters, what we mean
are you take a target account and your post about
that account. We can share examples, but essentially it is
kind of congratulatory post to find a trigger or a

(15:14):
good news piece of information about that account. You write
about that and you might mention also how they would
benefit from improving let's say their sales and marketing collaboration
if you're into ABM or any other aspect, any other

(15:35):
process that your product actually helps them. So these work
really well because now sales has a good piece of
content that is guaranteed to attract the attention of that
target account, can use it to start conversations content collaborations,
and another one where basically the sales can help you
create content by reaching out to their connections to target

(15:59):
account on asking for the quote. It's an easy way
to create content but also obviously is a start of
a conversation for that sales rep. So I would ask carselves, like, okay,
do we have existing assets that they can repurpose? What
are the other easy ways? How can we support them

(16:22):
from the marketing team. But also, don't just think about
any content, think about content that can actually help them
start conversations.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
If you don't mind, I just want what so t
top for a second, because we had to create questions
about content and I think it would be perfect address. Yeah,
so one is from Christina and the second one from Kanako,
So like, I think that would be beneficial to cover
both of them. So the first one from Christina. Lot

(16:55):
of our sales reps really junior are almost out of
school and they have or industry knowledge to share and
target account bar would click on that profile they see
that sells reps are to junior. So let's cover the
fundamental issue. You put unqualified sales reps in front of

(17:17):
your bars, that's that's the fundamental goal to market mistake. Right,
Obviously we can. I mean, this problem has deeper roots.
I know where it's coming from. But if if that's
the intent, so these people would be just sendence scripted messages.
The first thing that will happen very soon they will

(17:38):
be replaced by AI as simple as that. Unfortunately, that's
the sad reality because I could do this monkey job
at scale if you just all you want to do
is send and scripted, you know, emails and messages. Now,
these solutions to this problem you need to have proper
on board and where these people have tons of interviews

(17:59):
with this subject matter expert and generally in that case
you need to have I believe you need to have
good account Bay's marketing motion, where these people are incorporated
and they are learning from senior people, understanding the jobs
to be done off buire persona, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera. So a couple of things here now aside

(18:20):
from this a finial anecdote, we just finished literally last week,
a pilot program with your neighbors from Belgium, another company
where we had juniors there, not almost out of school,
but still junior as there. This was probably in our

(18:42):
entire history, the most efficient ABM program in terms of
pipeline value generated from ABM and sales opportunities. White again,
because a couple of things were true. First kind of
finished what I just mentioned. We made sure that this
person was properly onboarded by subject matter experts, et cetera.

(19:05):
Obviously it takes time until all the knowledge gaps will
be fulfilled, but at least the initial kind of initial
onboarding was done properly. Next, this person was closely working
with subject matter expert and marketing as well. So that
was a list of topics. We have a specific exercise

(19:29):
for this. We have extracted list of the most important
topics that we need to talk about to be able
to create demand from these accounts. And next, this content
was created not by salescrap obviously, this was created by marketing.
But the profile of that person was optimized. It's if

(19:51):
you look at this profile, it's not the junior SDR
that wants to sell whatever. Right, this profile looks like
an industry professional. Right, So if you look at the
profile of that person, you'll feel that this is a
knowledgeable person that has tons of experience in that space.
And the good news that this person is absolutely capable

(20:13):
to have initial discussions and do the initial calls, and
dependent on we have good products in place for pre
qualifying the accounts and their needs. So dependent on the
status of the bar persona either involve kind of solution architect, right,
the person who can talk about technical things, or a

(20:33):
senior account executive. That's all. Account executives are subject matter
experts that could help with with the call facilitation, which
gives im mediate value for the for the buyers. Right.
So that's that's that's the first question and the second one.
If you want to take this.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
From absolutely thank you. Son is asking piggyback on behavior.
Christina questions other possibility, What if our sales reps are
not active on LinkedIn and having established themselves as SMEs,
if they stay, sorry, if they start posting all of

(21:14):
a sudden, wouldn't that look unauthentic? Well, how do you
actually become How do you start being seen as a
subject matter as expert? How do you establish yourself as
somebody who is known in the industry? Exactly by doing this,

(21:36):
exactly by not only posting. Obviously you need to build
that audience, so you need to do other activities that
we're about to share in a moment. But by sharing
that content is exactly how you will start creating that
awareness and start to change that perception and position. I

(21:58):
think Andrea also addressed this, like the profile will update, update,
You'll start sharing the content and even with a junior person.
As it can be seen from the example that Andre shared,
this can be overcome. Now. I think I if I
ask myself and play Devil's advocate, I think I can

(22:19):
see cases where you have, you know, people maybe coming
from a different industry, they're new to the industry, they
don't have connections in the target industry, et cetera. And
if I look at the slide that we're sharing here,
there is an example of a post for ingredients of
a great Q and engineer. And this was a post

(22:42):
that was created by one of our clients who had
zero knowledge about what it means to be a QA
quality Assurance and software engineer. Essentially, like so they're very technical,
they didn't have that background, they didn't have a lot
of knowledge, and by the way, they weren't unauthentic pretending

(23:04):
to have that knowledge. What he did was he basically,
you know, asked. He was asking himself the questions that
he knew from the audience based on all the research
and everything that the audience was asking. And then he
was finding other people who were actually already kind of

(23:24):
recognized had the credibility with this audience, and he was
curating their content. So in this case, he found insights
from four different subject matter experts and put together a
carousel and share that work really well. Even though he
didn't have that background, even though he wasn't really even

(23:45):
connected to the target audience, This post worked really well. Actually,
So what I'm trying to say is that you can
also do this in a way that feels more authentic
by saying, hey, this is what I learned. I mean,
I'm talking. I'm a sales or a woman. I'm talking
every day with customers, and this is what I learned

(24:06):
from them, and this is what I learned from my
subject expert. This is actually how in this specific case,
that person was sharing the content. So he was somebody
who was trying to learn about the industry. The way
that he was positioning himself is like, Okay, I'm now
that's my job. I'm in this industry and i want

(24:27):
to learn about this industry, and I'm sharing what I'm learning, right,
I'm kind of curating this information and sharing my lessons learned.
So there, I don't really see that as inauthentic. I
don't see any problem with that. It's actually quite the opposite.
It is the way for that person to overcome this perception.

(24:49):
And I think we could now dive in and I
would like to ask you, because you have really good
experiences with account mapping, to explain this step or this.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Limits absolutely so the second step, which is by default
sales function, is account mapping, which means that sales are
supposed to do multi threading and engaging with the entire
band committee. The sad reality is that in too many
Bit of B companies that never happens. So companies define

(25:23):
you know that I simply don't know any bit of
B company that would say we don't know our target
buyer personas they usually say, obviously we have our ideal
customer profile nailed down. Were now our buyer persona? And
then you ask, okay, so what's this and then they
start sharing with you, you know, C plus and VP
titles right now. When you ask about the role of

(25:47):
this bar persona, they always say, these are the decision makers.
We just need to get the decision makers and sell
to them. If you assil them to startups to smaller organizations,
it's non questionable. That's absolutely true. Now the fun begins
if you start selling to mid market and especially enterprise companies.

(26:09):
We just did once this experiment was what was a
couple of years ago when we had senior account executive
and the call and it was about expansion play, if
you remember what. So we asked they are selling to
just to maybe to give everybody a proper example. So
the company, the target account is called Oracle. So you

(26:32):
all know this company right now. They're selling to IT teams.
They sold to one unit, one business unit in the US.
They sell worldwide, and the goal is to do expansion worldwide.
So I'm saying, okay, help me to understand your kind
of buying committee mapping process. So what person does Hey,

(26:54):
I'm just open linked and sales navigator. So let's select
Oracle as an account, and so let's select the seniority
title senior director whatever I forgot the exact titles and
sales navigator. But let's say we apply seniority level some
core titles. We have ten thousand potential buyers. So I'm saying,

(27:19):
what's next, like an awkward pouset happens, Well, I'm I
guess I would just maybe apply a few more filters
and then just apparently see what kind of some right
personas here and then what well, I will just add
them to my you know, candons. As simple as that.

(27:43):
So question to all of you, how efficient the think
is this motion? How likely this company is to generate
new sales opportunities with this expansion play? Right? They're miserable.
The same, by the way, is applicable to new client generation.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
Right.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
So the problem is that companies don't really know the
buying committees. And the second problem, which everybody ignores. I mean,
obviously maybe that would be a few sales reps that
would call me a kind of all obsolete old school
marketing guy. They would say, hey, you know, I'm like

(28:22):
Leo dicapri in the Wolf from the Wall Street. I
can call anybody and just sell anybody. I simply never
met this, folks, but I believe a couple of them
would be. The problem that they all ignore is the
anecdote that I would love to shore with you, which
were kind of spotted, was what a few months ago

(28:45):
that was a conference I feel it was a double
conference in the US, and that was Cicio from Snowflake,
so probably all know Snowflake. So when he finished his keynote,
the room was full of sales reps and one sales
rep raised hand and said, Hey, I just have one

(29:07):
quick question while you are on the stage, can I
can I ask you? Yeah? For sure. So my question
is how can I attract your attention? Of what we
as sales reps can do to attract your attention like
senior city of enterprise account right and said, it's not possible.
The only way to attract my attention if you attract

(29:29):
the attention of my team, and my team will come
back to me and tell me that there is a
vendor or there is a product, or there is a
solution to our strategic initiatives, and they will show me
how our team will benefit and why should we invest
into this? Right now, that's the only way you can
attract my attention or another another anecdotic, but this is

(29:53):
what you experience first hand. When we were talking to
another city of a prospect, not a client, but a
company that were negotiating with and sit you are the same.
He said, Look, guys, you can send the like super
personalized the mail to me. You can know all details
about me, but if I don't know you, it will

(30:16):
be bulk deleted. I simply don't have time to read
the emails from unknown sales reps. So when I'm headed
with this, the sad reality is that you shouldn't focus
only the decision makers. You need to create awareness inside
the entire band committee, right, champions, power users. You need

(30:38):
to think about all potential groups, influencers, people who are
not directly working with you, but would be involved into
the internal decision making process. And if you want to
generate these deals, again, as I would love to elaborate
on this, if you'll sell them to small businesses, to startups, etc.
That's not your problem. But if you'll sell them to

(30:58):
mid sized organizations enterprises, this is the only way you'll
be able to sell, aside from occasional sales where you
god luck it right. But you need to distinguish like
and robust. That's the key. So from that perspective, sales
must create awareness among all buy and committee members. Do

(31:20):
this regular multi thread and making sure that when internal
conversation happens and when this team is evaluated different vendors,
you are in the consideration stage, you has been considered.
That's the key, all.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
Right, So let's move on to two more key elements
or pillars of brand awareness or how sales can impact
that brand awareness. I think this is really the key
excuse me, this is the key activity and one that's
not a lot of salespeople actually do. This is social

(32:01):
or community engagement. And when we say engagement, what we
mean simply is engaging with the buyers, if they're sharing posts,
commenting on their posts, if they are commenting, engaging in
the conversation with them, are sending them personalized connection requests,

(32:22):
engaging with people that they follow, commenting and creating awareness
really in their feed right and in their notification. And
people are sometimes thinking like, okay, but if I do this,
will it's maybe not seeming authentic, but they will be

(32:46):
posting let's say, maybe they're posting not always on the
relevant topics, et cetera. Will this seem draining? Will this
seem will this? Will this look good? And actually what
is the truth? The truth is that if you look
at LinkedIn and a lot of buyers, how do they
actually post? Well, they post him frequently, they might share

(33:07):
some updates, and they are not you know, usually like
leaders on LinkedIn that have thousands and tens or hundreds
of thousands of followers, that receive so much engagement. So
when there is an engagement, usually they will notice it,
so that's one thing to consider. And whenever there is

(33:29):
an engagement, it's so much easier to start a conversation.
If I'm trying to connect with Andre and we don't
know each other, If I share a thoughtful comment on
his post, and then I connect with him and I say, hey,
love the inside you shared and whatever, try to continue
that conversation from that comment in private messaging, He's much

(33:54):
more likely to accept it. Right, So that's really the key.
We mentioned social so many times. This is I think
the bread and butter of sales and creating awareness be
where the buyers are. Well in some cases your buyers
may not be or some buyers may not be on social.
Where do you go then, And there are different places

(34:17):
which you can go for technical buyers. These could be communities.
For some markets you will have, you know, technical buyers
who might still be checking out and reading some posts
on LinkedIn. But and in some cases you might even
be able to stand out because not a lot of

(34:39):
other people or brands are sharing content in that space,
right if that's a kind of a niche space. But
at the same time, they might not be very engaged
on the platform, they might not post, they might not comment,
they might be like very silent observers. So in that case,
if there is a community could be like a slight

(35:00):
community discord, it could be you know, a traditional forum there,
you might have bigger luck. So and it's actually even
better because you don't even have to create and share content.
You can ask questions, you can engage with other people's
posts and like. As you can see in this example,

(35:20):
this was just a like normally in a community will
have much bigger engagement if you're regular, if you're known
by the community members. But in this case, our client
the first time came there, ask a specific question and
got quite good engagement in my opinion, by different people.

(35:43):
He asked about experience with you know, let's say in
this case, was about something in regulated testing in regulating industries,
and a lot of people gave some feedback, gave some ideas,
gave some insight there, and he could then also, by
the way, then collect that inside and create a post
that you share both on LinkedIn and in that community.

(36:04):
So you can see how that can work really really great.
But the key point really or a key takeaway here
is that you might not have content to share. It
might be difficult to get that done internally. Yes, there
are workarounds that you can do, but there might be difficulties.

(36:25):
But for engagement on social communities, there is basically no excuse.
There is definitely something that anybody can do and it's
a missed opportunity not to do it. So while these
are not exhaustive list of ways for sales to create awareness,

(36:47):
there is a couple of more that will share. In
the moment when we talk about distribution, I think maybe
we can shift gears and start talking about the other
elements of demand generation other than awareness. And the next
one that I had was about that we had was
about demand generation itself.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
Absolutely, So that's the second part of the process, as
we spoke right. First, when we create awareness, we do
it for the for several reasons. Right, we want to
build the relationship as the buying committee, we want to
create this visibility, and we want to make sure that
these people will reply back to us. So from that perspective,
we need to have a couple of activities in place, right,

(37:29):
one of them is in depth acount research. Again, maybe
we're just evangelizing ABM philosophy here, right, but I simply
don't know any way to create enterprise sales opportunities without
mappen out your solution or your offer to strategic initiatives

(37:49):
of target accounts, concrete strategic initiatives, not something like the
health companies X, Y and Z. Was something like with
the typical value prop right, but just fully personalized offering right,
and that is also tailored to the buying committee members
that you try to engage. So for this specific reason,

(38:12):
you need to have in depths of count research and
also progressive profiling. Progressive profiling is constantly collecting new insights
about the initiative, challenges, goals, KPIs jobs to be done
off your target buyer personas through multiple conversations you have.
And from that specific reason, obviously this is not black

(38:33):
and white process. That doesn't mean that you just either
send them the message hey, can you tell me your challenges? Next,
can you tell me your priorities and expect them they
reply or don't reply right now, obviously I'm not referring
to this. So from that perspective, we need to have
multiple touch points, right, And what mentioned the content the

(38:55):
distribution of the content that allow us to spark this
conversations right, that's the key. And from that perspective, a
few helpful metrics that we love to track is account
penetration basically with how many buying committee members we were
able to connect and engage and what is our account
to conversation ratio, which means with how many accounts we

(39:19):
have this on going conversations. Right. Again, I don't I'm
not referring. I'm not referring in this case to the
discovery costs. But these are the conversations where you try
to understand better the needs, you open the doors basically
to understand the initiatives of these accounts. Right. So from
that perspective, it means that we have two sides of

(39:41):
the account research process. One is the public account research
or the desk research as we call it, right, which
means that you need to collect all the publicly available
information about the strategic initiative of your target accounts. And
then the private research one to one research where you'll
be gained the information that is only possible to collect

(40:05):
via one to one conversations. Right. So that's the key.
I will cover the first part about the in depth
account research and if you guys are interested, we have
done an episode with Jim from Terminus once about the
count research process and where we cover this a more detail.
We also have this another ABM course. So I will

(40:26):
just highlight the key key details right when it comes
to a count research, obviously there are a few sources
that are publicly available for you. There is a company
press releases, annual feelings, annual reports, right, anything that you
can easily spot. But what we have seen where the

(40:47):
golden nuggets hidden is the interduce with the key stakeholders.
So quite often, for example, we also observe there's another
consultant projects when we're engaged with the same else teams,
they name a few publicly available facts that they could
see from the website. But then I'm always starting. I'm

(41:08):
trying to dig jeeper and find were any interviews at
least in the recent year, right in the last twelve
months with the key stakeholders, and obviously years ago it
was complicated. You need to sit down, you need to
listen to this interial, So you need to hire somebody
from I don't know up work, for example, to listen
to the interials and transcribe and summarize it for you. Nowadays,

(41:31):
you just in few clickaways to listen to this interior,
summarize and even with the help of AI, you can
quickly find the necessary effects. Right and you don't need
to ask GPT to pretend to be a war person.
Don't do this please, but you can just literally transcribe
it with the script, put the text into AI in

(41:53):
any AI software and ask hey, can you please find
the moments when they are talking about and then you
mentioned strategic initiators that are relevant to you, right, and
that's the key. And then you start analyzing the buyer's language,
what exactly they're talking about, not what AI shares with you.
So that's that's that's the point. This is these are

(42:13):
the essential points that would be highly beneficial for you
because based on this next you can share the insights
west marketing and discuss together prends, TURM together what pieces
of content can we create that would be helpful, for example,
to attract attention to our product. Right related to this
kind of key initiative, So key challenges, how can we

(42:37):
build our Oh if I am self REPP, what how
can I build my next conversations with these different band
committee members? What can I say? What can I share
with them? Right? If maybe if you have a calendar
of different events, you can say, hey, guys, can we
maybe shift a little bit the angle of our next
event and cover like these specific topics. Right, because I'm

(43:00):
saying that this is a repetative pattern in my set
of strategic accounts, so that could be multiple things. And again,
don't look only at the decision makers. Make sure that
you look at potential champions, influencers, et cetera. Right, that's
the key. So the goal is to find the golden
niggets that will allow you to the frosted margery and

(43:23):
the further relationship building with these account So that's the
first part. The second one is the content collapse. That's
what already mentioned a couple of times, and these are
other activities that help you to gain these personalized insights.

Speaker 1 (43:40):
So basically you want your goal is to kind of
again go back, go step back. Your goal as a
sales rep within the demand generation part is to get
these insights about the priorities challenges of those target accounts
so that you can create demand by showing them how

(44:03):
you can help, how you and your solution can actually solved,
help solve those challenges, help them reach their goals right,
So understanding those challenges, goals, priorities, et cetera is a
key and under it showed how can we use the
publicly available information? But not everything can be gleamed from

(44:24):
the public information. Actually, the best kind of insights are
inside their information. Now you can just go and ask, hey,
are you buying right now? And do you have this
challenge because nobody would answer we don't know each otter,
why would I answer that privileged information and whatnot. But

(44:46):
you can start this conversation, start getting that inside by
these tactics that we are sharing right now. And the
first one that under here highlighted on sliced content collaborations,
and here we just shared one where we just reached
to our network and asked about the biggest ABM objections

(45:07):
that the biggest ABM objections that our network, our prospects
buyers get from their sales, get from their leadership. And
we created content about it. Okay, we created nineteen post
about it, we created the podcast about it. Now, think

(45:29):
about that question. I mean, it's a good question to
ask anyhow, because I think everybody wants to know answers
to that question. Because it's like we're reaching out to
usually our champions, people who need to sell our solution
to their leadership and get sales on board. And we

(45:51):
know that they will get critical questions from their leadership
from the sales, and they want to know how to
answer those questions. So from the perspective, yeah, they're interested
to know answers to the question, so it's a good
way to reach out to them. But from our perspective
as a vendor, it's also really good to know what
specific objective objections they are getting. This is a key

(46:15):
piece of information, of course, to know. So I'm just
sharing that concrete example, but there are many different ways
in which could in which you could implement it. Essentially
reaching out, getting a quote from people, getting some input,
and creating content based on that. You can get insider information,

(46:36):
but you can also use that to continue that conversation
on that topic. Another tactic that you can use is,
and we like this a lot, is pre event engagement. Now,
when you were signing up for this live podcast, because
it's an event, there's always a question like that. There

(46:58):
is in the four you can also feel in any
questions that you might have. So we are collecting that
information and we promise you. You're not going to follow
up with you based on that. But another way is
just for a sales rep to connect and say, hey,
you know what my expert such and such. You just
let's say you're registered for a webinar with Andre and

(47:20):
Andrew is the expert that you trust, and you're registered
for his webinar. And let's say I'm a sales rep
and I'm reaching to you. I don't know even I'm
reaching to you, and I'm saying, hey, even thanks a
lot for registering for that webinar that Andrea is giving
about ABM. He asked me to reach out to attendees
and just ask what are the top questions that you

(47:44):
have so that he can focus his webinar on what's relevant? Right,
what are the what is the top challenge that you're
trying to solve and learn more about doing this webinar?
Great question to ask, help me connect with you. You're more
likely to accept my connection or to respond to me.
It helps Sunday to give a better webinar, but it

(48:05):
also helps me as a sales rep, to get this
insider info about the priorities and challenges. Other than collecting
the information and then using that to create this personalized
follow up. Personalized solutions. And I don't like the word pitches, right,

(48:27):
but instead of making just empty pitches, actually showing how
solutions can help. There are other things that sales should
be doing during demand generation and that's a very simple thing.
We call non sales touch points, right, So we are
trying to build a relationship. Maybe they're not yet ready,

(48:49):
maybe they're collecting the information. Maybe we have collected the
information but the time was not right. But you can
still keep in touch, keep top of mine as a
person with that target buyer. With very lightweight, very non
sales zy touch points, you can use content distribution, share

(49:11):
you know, piece of content, like like I did here.
I was connected to the buyern WhatsApp. I knew that
they were looking to hire, so I offered to help
promote that job. Post that happened like I don't know,
like I guess two months later or one month later
or something like that. And yeah, we had some free

(49:35):
tickets for sas stuff that I offered them. That's another great,
great way to have a non sales touch point. By
the way, this was a deal that we eventually won
because we were very persistent. It was at the beginning
we had. We weren't choosers. We had to we had
to be persistent. Uh. And that's all I wanted to

(49:58):
say about the sales role in demand generation. So to
sum it up to public research to identify the priorities
and challenges. Do use tactics such as content collaboration, prevent
outreach to get more info, insider info, and kind of

(50:19):
never stop following up, but not just hey are you ready? Now? Hey,
how about now? But with more meaningful start that can
be content distribution, sharing valuable insights, but also just being
helpful in other ways, which brings us to the next
element in demand generation model of use, which is distribution.

Speaker 2 (50:45):
I just wanted to joke and say, hey, I just
wanted to tell me because my boss asks at what
stage our as your currently? I just wanted to let
let me know what is the stage? It is right,
psyched report and the next.

Speaker 1 (51:04):
You're still at this discovery stage. Where are you? I
need to move you in my serra.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
Yeah, when I can actually move you, right? So anyhow,
jokes aside regarding the previous point, I just wanted to
drop a few cents about non sales touch points and
just wanted to share a practical example. You guys already
asked a couple of questions, right. One of them was

(51:31):
from Christina for example about junior sales scraps. Simple example
of non sales touch point. I would be reaching out
after this podcast, just for example, saying Hi, Christina, thanks
for a fantastic question. We have a like linked and
profile optimization guide for your sales traps wanted to share
with you, and again, depending on your relationship, right, So

(51:54):
sometimes it would be appropriate. Sometimes it's just enough to
share this piece of content. But sometimes you can say,
if if you would be up, we can have a
quick call and just review the profiles of your sales
faults and brainstorm how that could be optimized.

Speaker 1 (52:07):
Right.

Speaker 2 (52:07):
A few ideas that you can facilitate internally. Why, because
the ways you to kill you kill two birds with
one stone. First, you deliver immediate value and you help
your target buyers, right, and two you create a piece
of content that they can use to create internal awareness
about you because they will say, hey, these guys share

(52:28):
it with me. In most cases it will be prended,
which is a positive distribution. And yeah, the thought factor
here you book the call, which is one of the
most essential things in the relationship building and further progressive profile.
And because this is the opportunity to ask additional questions
why that's the case, what's what resistance do you face,

(52:50):
what challenges your face, and et cetera. So this is
the key we have. I'm just looking at the deck
that's considering the fact that we're almost in the MIDI
I feel that we won't be able to cover all
of this in the next seven minutes. So for everybody
who is interested, I dropped the link in the chat
to our and UBI to the Demand Gen playbook where

(53:12):
we share all these examples in more detail and give
a step by step guideline on how to first of all,
how to get buy in from sales to run those
programs together, and then the exact examples and it's in
place that you can use to maintain this campaign. This
sory playbooks. So check the link in the chat please,

(53:36):
And I feel what would be beneficial if I'll cover
a few more questions. One of them was from even
I know it's not a typical case, but imagine we
can't reach out to our customers to gather insights buying
Journey and Buying Committee members. What activities would you suggest
to run to collect all this information to build ICP. So,

(54:02):
first of all, I think we're kind of maybe I'm
not full understanding the question because usually you create ICP
based on your clients, based on your historical data, the
goal and your program. You're always like the full The
complete goal of Ideal Customer Profile and Exercise is to

(54:24):
define the patterns of your best clients that you want
to replicate.

Speaker 1 (54:28):
Right.

Speaker 2 (54:28):
You want to identify the qualification criteria, you want to
identify the pharmagraphics criteria, the buying commut a structure, the
buying triggers, et cetera. And you do it based on
the based on the existing clients. If you are a
farm about let's say pipeline generation process, right, how can

(54:49):
we sell to these accounts without knowing all this information?

Speaker 1 (54:55):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Then I would say you are in trouble. Maybe not
the best advice that I can give, but I would
jougs aside. Again, you need to figure out the activities
that will enable you to collect this information. Again, what
was flood? Whenever we do in person workshops or our
ab and boot camps, we always give when when, especially

(55:20):
when it comes to creating playbox. We always give one
restriction to playbooks development. You are not allowed to use
email and linked in, So what are you going to
do in this case? So imagine LinkedIn and emails are
not available and cold colum as well, So what are
you going to do?

Speaker 1 (55:40):
Right?

Speaker 2 (55:41):
What would be your activities? And from this perspective, this
kind of opens the doora box, right, so companies to
market ourselves as they start thinking out loud about all
potential opportunities. But to give you an example, we had
experience more we experienced this multiple times was FLAOD when
for example h v I see project the target audience

(56:03):
engineers at factories, people who don't have any social profile.
Maybe they have Facebook profiles, but it's very hard to
understand that these are the exact people that we are targeting.
They don't have LinkedIn profiles. They it's not literally it's
almost not possible to find the working emails because they
are not publicly available anywhere, right and even if you'll

(56:26):
find if you reach out to them, they're not going
to respond. So for us, what we did we found
each VACA association and we were partnered with them sponsoring
via this association. Why this association, the market research, trying
to get connections to the target accounts. So that's that's

(56:46):
one of the ways. Another way is just thinking about
what types of events you can host, where again it's
not scalable from the perspective like how many companies think
about scalability. But I guess, like if you mentioned this
use case, in most cases you have a big contract value, right,

(57:07):
so it's usually closer to million oi above right. So
from that perspective, these activities like in person events, business
breakfast and sometimes even just to give you an idea.
Sometimes I did this in the past personal element working
for corporations. It's just paying a well known SOT leader

(57:29):
or speaker, paying the gig and arrange on a workshop
and inviting the strategic accounts to that workshop so they
can basically to listen to that sort leader. But then
you incorporate a few of your own thoughts, you're able
to prequalify them, et cetera. So Josh Sharon, is your
the ideas there are always ways you just need to
think out of LinkedIn and the mail box on how

(57:52):
you'll be able to tract this information.

Speaker 1 (57:55):
And one more question, if we still have two minutes
to answer from Christina. Thank you Christina for fantastic engagement
and all the questions, good questions. Bright the way glad
you mentioned in contact section and the beginning example of
asking for the quote from the target account. What will

(58:16):
be the flow and how could you give an example
of what to do next? And could you give an
example of what to do next once we have getted
all quotes from all our target buyers. So the flow
here would be, you know, you're going to be much
more likely to get a response from target accounts if

(58:38):
you have some social proof. If this is not the
first person you're reaching out, you have never done this before,
it's going to be the most difficult. So what we
usually do is obviously first you want to come up
with the right question. So the flow is the first
is like, we want to come up with the right question.
How do you come up with the right question? You
go to sales and you ask if you had to

(59:01):
bet your salary or your bonus, your commission on a
target account and winning that deal, what is the information
that you would like to know about them? What is
the information that you would like to understand whether to
bet on them? But also what is the information they
would like to know in order to be able to

(59:21):
create a perfect sales presentation for that account. And you
listen to those questions and so you pick some of
those questions. I would somehow try to figure out these questions.
A second, you take the question they want to ask.
So let's say, if we want to write about ABM
objections like we did in that example, I would probably like,

(59:44):
if that's the first time I'm doing I have no
credibility on LinkedIn, right, So it's the typical situation. I
would ask my internal experts, like anybody internally who can
give me a quote. Maybe I'm connected to some people,
maybe I have a good relationship with an existing customer,
or anybody who is kind of a low hanging throuit.

(01:00:05):
But any expert who can give me a quote already, right,
And I would also share that right so that I
can now point when I'm reaching out to new target accounts,
I can also point to what we have done in
the past because it's easier. It's like more legitimate people
are not going to be suspecting you of paytent switch,
which a lot of people. Unfortunately, there are few, few,

(01:00:30):
few bad sales reps that ruined it for everyone, and
now everybody is mistrustful. So that's just the reality I
have to accept. So building that social proof just gives
you the credibility. Hey, this, this person is reaching out
to me to get info and try to get me
into conversation. But they are actually genuinely sharing that and

(01:00:52):
they have other credible people who have already participated, you know,
so the social proof helps there. Right. Then the next
step would be to ask, go ahead and ask that
quote and to collect it. Then would be to share
that content. Right, So whether you would collect quotes from

(01:01:16):
different people and create one LinkedIn post, or maybe you
were doing an article or whatever. Right, you would then
create that asset and share it on LinkedIn. Then you
would tag that target account, that targeted buyer, that person
in that LinkedIn post, thanking them for the input. Then

(01:01:37):
you would go back to that person and you would
share that content and say, hey, by the way, we
just share this, thank you very much. Right, and from
there on you have kind of two options. You have
an option to try to get into that conversation deeper
in conversation about that topic. Hey, I love this inside

(01:01:57):
you know you mentioned this, and you know you could
try to drive deeper in that conversation, or what you
could do is you could, for example, let's say we're
also running an event on the same topic, I would
do something like this, Hey, you know love their input people.

(01:02:17):
This post work really well. It seems like there is
a lot of interest in that topic. So we decided
to run an event about this topic in case you
would like to attend. This could be another way to
continue that relationship or that nurturing process. Many different ways
in which you can do that. Obviously, the next time

(01:02:38):
I wouldn't stop there. I would probably if this was
just a quote for a LinkedIn post that was an
easy thing, I would do another one and try and
I would reach out to people who already contributed, or
maybe if I have a let's say, if I have
a podcast or other ways where I can actually interview people,
not just get their quote via the message, I would

(01:03:00):
then invite that person. You know, a lot of your
contribution people seemed to resonate. I saw that you had
a lot of experience in that. You know, my marketing
team just started the podcast and you and asked me
to find people who are connected. I shared your quote
and your contribution to this piece of content, and they
felt that it would be a great guess would you

(01:03:22):
be interested to join the podcast? Hopefully I gave you
enough ideas about how you could structure this in a flow,
how you could follow up, and what you could do
with all of that information collecting quotes, and finally, of course,
if you had you know enough back and forth, if

(01:03:42):
you had enough to collect enough information, whether through that
additional interview just a normal back in forth, et cetera,
and now you really feel like, hey, there might be
an opportunity here, a potential opportunity here, then you would
go into the last part, which unfortunately we couldn't. We

(01:04:03):
didn't have the chance to finish, which is, okay, how
do you capture the demand that you have created, or
in this case, how do you try to basically book
a call? And I'll just give one example. There are
different ways in which you can do this, and and
they mentioned like creating a personalized solution and sending it
to them and creating content hub. Another one could be also,

(01:04:26):
you know, you mentioned that you're struggling with this, and
I just spoke to our expert. Let's say that's an
EE or an internal sales architects sales engineer whomever is Internally,
I spoke to my colleague about your question, and he
or she they offered to host a quick session and

(01:04:49):
to share some of the best tips because they worked
on a lot of projects like that and they basically
offering in kind of an expert session. That could be
one example. I'll stop here. Okay, it like it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:04):
It was a long answer, I sudly just say, hey,
sends a lot for sharing a quote. What do you
be up for having a discovery call with me? I
think you just complicated a little bit. But jobs aside,
I think when you ask about flow, uh, the first
question that you need to ask how we're going to

(01:05:27):
maintain the relationship with these people? Right? How can we
maint how can we raise the curiosity in our product?
What next we can do to facilitate that relationship and
collect uh the necessary insights about this bar person and
this account to be able to even touch the offer

(01:05:48):
part of the sales process, right, Because when sales come
and ask about flows, they always perceive that there are
easy steps, Like I just said, thanks for the quote,
but the gimmis unfortunately or silver bullets. Right. So just
the fact that you do content collaboration and they give
you the quote doesn't mean that it's a time now

(01:06:09):
to hook them and try to book a discovery call.
So the right process for you would be just thinking about, Okay,
we've got the reply, we have kind of we have
an entry relationship. How can we build on this? That's
the key And on this note, I would love to
wrap up this episode. Thank you everybody for create questions.

(01:06:31):
Fantastic engagement, always a pleasure I have on you guys
on this live podcast. Will make an East pause for
two weeks, come back in early May with a few
life case status will be invited, our clients was home
will be We'll just finishing the pilot programs in Q one,

(01:06:55):
So again that would be a fantastic opportunity for all
of you to learn from your peers, ask all the
critical questions that he wants marketing and sales teams and
learn the practical implementation of a canbas marketing. That's being said,
Happy is for everybody, and see in a few weeks.

(01:07:17):
Take care.

Speaker 1 (01:07:18):
Thank you,