738 - Signal-Based Selling: Aligning Marketing and Sales Efforts, with Alan Zhao

Collin Mitchell and Alan Zhao from Warmly dive into the world of revenue orchestration and the challenges of engaging prospects at the right time. They discuss the importance of aligning sales and marketing efforts, emphasizing the need for quality engagement over quantity. The hosts highlight the significance of signal-based selling and leveraging website traffic to enhance conversion rates. They also touch on the evolving landscape of sales and marketing post-2020, emphasizing the shift towards warm approaches for better results.

Follow the Host:
Collin Mitchell (Partner, Leadium)

Our Episode Guest:
Alan Zhao (Co-Founder, Warmly)

Sponsored By:
Leadium | The leader in outbound sales appointment setting

*If you'd like to be a guest on the show or have any questions, email us at [e-mail] - Just tell us why you're reaching out and we'll contact you as soon as we can!

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Alright, welcome back to another episode of Sales Transformation brought
to you by Ledium. I'm your host, Collin Mitchell, and we've got Alan Zo back
on the show. He's the co-founder of Warmly. The last
time we had Alan on, we talked a little bit about all of
the pivots that Warmly has made and the
story behind what has made Warmly

(00:21):
go in the direction that they are with this idea of warm outbound. And
today we're going to dig a little bit deeper into revenue orchestration and what
Yeah. For anybody who missed the first episode that we had you on, do
you want to give us just a little bit of background on yourself and then we'll dig into today's

(00:43):
Yep. So I was, I'm one of the co-founders. I started off
as one of the engineers and then became CTO and
moved around a lot internally within the company in various roles from sales,
And, uh, The last time we had you

(01:03):
on, we talked about this problem that you guys have taken
on to solve where you actually worked within Warmly as
an SDR. And the biggest problem that
you found was when it was the right time to
engage with prospects. And so today
we're going to talk a little bit about revenue orchestration. First

(01:28):
Awesome. Yeah. So revenue orchestration. The
whole idea behind this is that in order to
properly execute some of these signal-based intent outbound
or sales or marketing efforts, and a lot of this comes from account-based marketing, is
right time, right message, right channel, right person. You
need many things happening simultaneously at once to be done

(01:51):
effectively. because the average buyer's headspan is like a
Gartner statistic out there, especially for someone viewing a
web page is like eight seconds. You got like eight seconds to make an impression with your
website and then they're gone. So how can a rep, you
know, research that person, that account, understand
the context behind it in the CRM, and then reach out with the right message

(02:11):
all inside of eight seconds? It's not possible. And then simultaneously calculating
that one person parallelized because there's, you know,
maybe 10, 20, 100 people on your site simultaneously as well. And
so it's a big expectation, but at the same time, I think about in terms of brick
and mortar stores as well, because when you walk into a brick and mortar store and
you have a question about like one of the items, but no one's there

(02:32):
to answer. And instead you get a call like a week later, like,
Oh, you had this question about this one shirt. Here's, here's, here's the
deal with it. It's already too late, way too late. And
that analogy can be applied to B2B SaaS, can be applied to software sales,

(02:54):
That's right. Bought it from the store across the street who
Yeah, yeah. So, I
mean, the interesting thing here is, you
know, this really helps sales
and marketing be more aligned with a common goal, right?

(03:17):
Because marketing's spending a lot of time, energy, money,
sweat, blood, whatever, to get people to the site, right?
And once they get to the site and they convert, whatever that looks like, you
know, it's sales job to get them to the finish line. So
this is really helping solve, you

(03:39):
Totally. I love this because And warmly over
here, we're of the opinion that obviously after 2020, much
of marketing and sales and the strategy that worked in the past, pre-2020, doesn't
work anymore. It's changing. So like cold is getting more difficult. And
of course, this is a very hotly debated topic. People might
be switching over to something more like warm. Sequences, targeting,

(04:03):
paid, all these things are getting a lot harder. But at the
end of the day, when someone is thinking about you or they're introduced to
your product or your company or your brand, One of the first things they're going to do
is they're going to visit your website. And so marketing's job, like
I've started to learn this as well more and more, is that it's to raise awareness, get people to
understand your brand, have a good positive impression of your
brand. What is brand to me? Brand is actually reputation. So the

(04:26):
moment that we bring people to the site is
when the roles and the
integration between marketing and sales has to be really tight. They come to the website. And
then the next thing that happens is we need to convert them from the website. And that's also
part of marketing's job. But this is where it starts to blend because with a tool that
allows you to chat with the person who's on the site and then convert that

(04:47):
into a sales conversation, that's where you're sort of really aligning marketing
and sales efforts together. Converting website traffic. And that's one of the things
Yeah. And I think that the, you know, with more
and more teams realizing that it's not about
quantity anymore, right? It's about quality, good
engagement with the right prospects at the right time. And, you

(05:09):
know, everybody understands this, that, you know, sending thousands
of emails and, you know, getting, you know, less than 5% conversion,
it just doesn't work. Or
hiring a bunch of SDRs and putting them on the phone and smile and
dial is not an effective strategy. And
the challenge that I think a lot of people are having at least when I'm talking with leaders with

(05:33):
outbound is that there's just way
more competition for your prospect's attention, right? Everybody's inbox
is full with stuff that they don't read, so even if you
have a great product, you're solving a real problem, and
you actually took the time to write a well-crafted, personalized message,
maybe even one-to-one, like not even a sequence, the

(05:55):
chances that it gets read are pretty slim. I
see at least on outbound, phone has the highest conversion, but
Why not have a way to reach the right people
That's right. Yeah, no, it's absolutely true. It is getting a

(06:15):
lot harder. It's hard to distinguish what are the positive signals,
but, you know, one of the, I come back to this again,
the website is the central choke point for all
of your marketing and sales outbound efforts. All that stuff will
eventually lead back to the website. And the fact that
they're on your website, and if you knew how they got there, like they

(06:36):
came from a podcast and knew that was a high converted channel, or they came
from paid, then you could do something about that. And
so, yes, this whole idea of like signal based selling, signal
based. Brian Hamer from gmail.com is active on the website. That's
hilarious. That's actually our product telling us that someone is on our website. You

(07:01):
tells you when one of your accounts that you own is on the website. And there it is. That's exactly
right. So if I responded back, maybe that person would have had a
The interesting thing that I think most people don't realize is, even
though let's say you're doing cold outbound, Most people are going to come to your website
before they reply to your email, right? They're going to check out if

(07:23):
they want to reply, right? They're not going to just, hey, you wrote a clever email
and I'm going to reply to you. Typically, they're going to take that domain. They're
going to look at your website. They might look real quick and
decide, is this something I'm interested in or not? And
so with something like this, you now have the ability to see, hey, I sent Alan
a cold email, maybe three cold emails. On the third

(07:43):
one, he actually opened it. Now he's on our site and he's on the pricing page.
So what is
Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, some of the signals that we also integrate
with it isn't just the website, but it's also a third party intent, like
Bombora, to see what research topics they have. So you're trying to gather

(08:04):
as much information as possible on the prospect and create the right
triggers, like the combination of triggers. And so you can create
these things like this, that not only are they on the pricing page,
but this is their fifth time on the pricing page. and their target account
from their account list. And their research topic indicates that they're hot for
your product because they were searching for these key topics in

(08:25):
the past seven days. And on top of that, three
other people from their company also visit the site. So once all these conditions are met, then
notify the rep. And again, it's at least personal
opinion here, but if you have the timing right and you have the
person right, what you say actually matters a lot less. So
it's really distinguishing. The timing and the person, these

(08:46):
two can operate on their own. And then you can just say, Hey, what's up? And
they are more likely to respond to you just from a, Hey, what's up? The timing is right. Then
if you concocted something crazy and like, Oh, I saw you came in from
Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and what to say is usually the thing
that people struggle with the most. Right. Um, which

(09:09):
That's right, yeah. We found it to be
very simple. If someone is hungry, like I like this analogy that
when you're going out drinking at a bar and it's 2 a.m. and
you're hungry and you walk outside the bar and there's a hot dog stand, I
mean, that hot dog stand is going to sell out. The fact that that hot dog stand is there doesn't
matter. But any other time during the day, it wouldn't get my

(09:31):
business. But just at 2 a.m. at that precise time. He
didn't need to say anything. I didn't need to. It's just mutual understanding that I'm
going to buy that hot dog. And that's kind of what it's at least how I see it. When
someone visits the site and they have high intent to have
Yeah. And the interesting thing is you might not even like hot dogs, but

(09:52):
you're eating one and you probably paid top dollar for
Yeah, inebriated, you know,
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