VIDEO 1: WHAT IS THE IDENTIFY STAGE AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

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1 VIDEO 1: WHAT IS THE IDENTIFY STAGE AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT? Hi, I m Jill Fratianne, Account Channel Manager at HubSpot. Welcome to the Identify class of the Inbound Sales Methodology. I ve been at HubSpot for over 6 years. With more than 10 years of selling experience, I ve worked in both the direct sales organization and partner agency selling experience. Identifying the right business opportunities from the start can be the difference of your business thriving or failing. Identifying the right opportunities strategically and effectively can help you create a predictable scalable sales funnel even if you don t practice inbound marketing. One other thing, prospecting is really hard but it has to become part of your DNA in some capacity if you want to generate new business. Practice makes perfect! In this class, you ll learn how to identify potential buyers within your target market. Identify is the first step of the Inbound Sales methodology. It starts with identifying leads within the large pool of strangers available. Identifying leads is pretty intuitive; you need to know who your company is targeting. Both legacy and inbound salespeople have historically done a good job at starting with their ideal buyer. The issue arises in the next step. Legacy salespeople haphazardly gather contacts that match the ideal profile as possible. They purchase lists. They search online networks like LinkedIn. Armed with hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of buyer names, legacy salespeople prematurely move to the Connect stage ready to bombard this list with generic value propositions. Legacy salespeople begin aimlessly calling these leads, either in the order they find them or maybe even alphabetically. But the majority of buyers have already started their buying journey before engaging with salespeople. Legacy salespeople fail to identify which buyers have started their journey and fail to engage with these buyers first. They fail to uncover the context about each target buyer. This context can be used during the Connect stage and beyond. As a result, legacy salespeople miss out on an opportunity to help with the buyer s areas of interest. 1

2 Inbound salespeople approach the identify stage in a more modern way. Once the ideal buyer profile is defined, Inbound salespeople listen to the market to identify the buyers that are active in a buying journey. These buyers may have recently visited the salesperson s company website, filled out a form, or opened one of the salesperson s s. Inbound salespeople practice social selling to proactively identify more buyers entering the buying journey. If inbound salespeople choose to reach out to passive buyers who haven t started their journey, they identify context for the buyer before moving to the Connect stage. Inbound salespeople use this context during the Connect stage to help the buyer with the topics that are top of mind. In the next video, we ll illustrate the details behind executing the Identify stage. VIDEO 2: HOW DO INBOUND SALESPEOPLE IDENTIFY LEADS? Welcome back folks. In the last video, we outlined the importance of the Identify stage in the Inbound Sales methodology. Let s get really tactical on how to setup and execute an effective Identify strategy within your company. Here are the steps behind an Inbound identify process. 1. Define your Ideal Buyer Profile 2. Identify leads that match your Ideal Buyer Profile 3. Enrich the lead with buyer context Starting with the first step - defining your ideal buyer profile. Before you can identify potential buyers, you need to define which buyers you can help and which buyers you can t. This is called the Ideal Buyer Profile. If you sell to businesses, the definition should be at the company level, not the contact level. Start your research online to find out as much about your potential buyer as possible. Search for what s published about them online. Many times, you can find the information you need to confirm an ideal fit and help you initiate a dialog. You should also speak with people to verify important details. 2

3 In a B2B context, here are some questions to consider when defining your Ideal Buyer Profile. Are there company sizes that are ideal, or not ideal? Do you define size as employees, revenues, customers, or another metric? Are there industries/verticals that are ideal, or not ideal? Are there geographic locations that are ideal, or not ideal? Are there other attributes of your buyer s customer that make the buyer ideal, or not ideal? For example, are companies that sell to other companies (B2B) better than companies that sell to consumers (B2C)? To be clear, do not confuse buyer personas with the ideal buyer profile. The ideal buyer profile defines which companies are a good fit for your offering and which ones are not. Buyer personas define the different buying patterns of companies and/or people within your ideal buyer profile. For example, your ideal buyer profile may be technology and healthcare companies with less than 10,000 employees. Within that ideal buyer profile, you may have different buyer personas. You may have different buyer personas for tech companies versus health care companies. You may have different buyer personas for the various roles involved in the buying decision at those companies. We will dive into defining buyer profiles in the next class on connect. Your best leads are strangers that match your ideal buyer profile AND are active in their buying journey. Inbound salespeople differentiate from legacy salespeople by prioritizing active buyers over passive buyers. One form of active buyers are visitors completing forms on your website, often referred to as inbound leads. As an inbound salesperson, you need to connect with inbound leads as soon as possible, as an important aspect of buyer context is timing. The moment an inbound lead converts represents a moment of interest by the buyer. The closer you can be to help the buyer at this moment of interest, the more helpful and successful you will be. The best way to identify Inbound leads is as follows: 1. Configure your website to send inbound leads to your CRM in real-time 2. Create a view in your CRM to view all new Inbound Leads. If possible, have the CRM alert you via or other mediums when a new inbound lead is generated. 3

4 3. If the inbound lead fits your Ideal Buyer Profile, move the lead to the enrichment step of the Identify process and then to the Connect stage immediately. I want to emphasize here that you are evaluating the company against your Ideal Buyer Profile, not the contact. If the inbound lead is from a good fit company but the contact is a lower level employee with no buying power, don t worry. This is a good lead. There is probably something happening at the company that caused the lower level employee to conduct research that you can help with. We will discuss how to approach this lead in the Connect class. 4. If the inbound lead does not fit your Ideal Buyer Profile, move the lead to unqualified status. These leads should no longer exist in the new Inbound lead view. Another source of active buyers are companies visiting your website, often referred to as inbound companies. A best-in-class website may convert 5% of visitors into inbound leads. That means, at least 95% of the potential buyers finding your website will not fill out a form and identify themselves. Just because these visitors do not fill out a form does not mean they are not in an active buying journey. You should make every effort to engage with these potential buyers. It is usually not possible to connect an anonymous website visitor with a specific buyer. However, modern technology enables you to identify the company from which an anonymous visitor originates. If the company fits your Ideal Buyer Profile: 1. Find the contact at the company that is the most likely buyer of your solution. Conducting an advanced search in LinkedIn, filtering by the company name and the role of your typical buyer, is an effective way to identify this contact. 2. Create a new lead in your CRM with this contact and company. 3. Move the lead to the enrichment step of the Identify process and then to the Connect stage immediately. A final source for active buyers are found through trigger events. The concept of trigger events has been around for a while. For example, decades ago if a salesperson noticed a newspaper article about a potential buyer, the salesperson may reach out to the potential buyer by referencing the article. In the same way that the Internet has empowered buyers with more information, it has also empowered salespeople with more information - and more trigger events! You 4

5 should listen for the trigger events that may suggest a buyer active in a buying journey. If you observe such a trigger event, create a lead in the CRM and move the lead to the enrichment step of the Identify process and then to the Connect stage. Example trigger events to listen for include: 1. A mention by a potential buyer in social media of your company or a competitor s company 2. A mention in social media by a potential buyer of a keyword or hashtag aligned with your value proposition 3. A social media post or blog post by a potential buyer 4. A press release about the buyer (i.e. raising capital, expanding offices, earnings results, etc.) 5. A job ad by the buyer relevant to your solution area 6. A new role or new executive hired by the company Social media presents an opportunity for you, as an inbound seller, to be perceived as a credible expert by your buyers. You should invest at least a few hours per week publishing content, responding to relevant conversations and sharing other content that would be interesting to your buyer. By doing so, not only will you develop your personal brand with your buyers but you will also identify additional leads to pursue. This practice is often referred to as social selling. You may ask yourself, Who has time for these efforts? Make time. Take time away from the initiatives that are working less effectively and reinvest that time in these more modern and effective tactics. If you are a salesperson and you attend a chamber of commerce meeting twice per month, try going only once this month and using the time saved to participate in conversations with your buyers online. If you are a salesperson and you plan to cold-call for 10 hours this week, cold-call for only eight hours and use the time saved to write a blog article about a question your buyers frequently ask you. Specific actions you should make are: 1. Find the people on Twitter that your prospects follow. They may be journalists. They may be thought leaders. They may be executives at companies that complement your offering. In order to gain their attention, share their content to your followers. Many of them will start to follow you back. Send them a direct message and introduce yourself. Set up a phone 5

6 call. Ask how you can help them. Help them. The next time you publish an article, ask if they would be willing to provide a quote that you can include in the article. Most likely, if your content is good, they will share it once it s published. By helping them spread their message first, they ll be more likely to help you spread yours. 2. Find the LinkedIn groups in which your prospects are active. Answer questions in the group. Pose your own questions and engage with those who respond. Post more thoughtful content on LinkedIn Pulse. Include links to relevant content your company has published. If no group exists, consider starting one and invite your customers and prospects to join 3. Find the blogs that your prospects read. Read the blogs for 15 minutes every day. Share these posts on Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites where your prospects are. Comment on the blog. Make sure your name on the comment links back to your LinkedIn profile or your company. Bloggers love comments. Good ones will respond to you. Comment back to them to keep the conversation going and leave a good impression. The next time you publish something, ask the blogger to share their perspective in the comments. Build a relationship. Ask if he would like you to submit a guest blog piece. 4. Publish to your company s blog. Check your s Sent Items folder. Often times you find yourself fielding the same questions from multiple prospects. You ve found an industry pain point! That makes for excellent blog content. If a question comes up routinely, imagine how many people would be interested in the answer. If you identify contacts that meet your Ideal Buyer Persona during your social selling routine, create a lead in your CRM. Move the lead to the enrichment step of the Identify process and then to the Connect stage immediately. If you are not generating enough leads through the methods above, first, invest more in inbound marketing, as these leads will be best for your business. Second, you need to proactively identify passive buyers. As we have stated before, Inbound sales is not limited to inbound leads. Inbound sales is about basing the entire sales process on the buying journey and personalizing the sales experience to the buyer s context so that they want to continue speaking with you, and are eager to learn more about you and your company s products and services. Let s apply the inbound sales principles to a passive buyer context. 6

7 A great technique to reach passive buyers is through common connections. Common connections may be professional acquaintances, personal friends, or maybe even family that happen to be connected to potential buyers. To leverage common connections: 1. Conduct an advanced search in LinkedIn filtering on the attributes in your Ideal Buyer Profile (i.e. industry, location, specific company name, etc.). For the Relationship strength, choose the 1st or 2nd degrees. 2. Sort through the results. Look for contacts at companies that match your Ideal Buyer Profile that you are connected to through a person you know reasonably well. 3. Once you find a contact that meets this criteria, add the contact and company to your CRM. Note the common connection. 4. Move the lead to the enrichment step of the Identify process and then to the Connect stage. We will cover how to leverage the common connection in the Connect class. A last resort for identifying passive buyers is to simply find companies that match your Ideal Buyer Profile. LinkedIn as well as company databases can be leveraged. In this case, I recommend having a high bar on the type of company you identify. With the absence of an active buyer or a common connection, connecting with the passive lead will be difficult. Therefore, make sure the company is as perfect a fit as possible. Once identified, add the contact and company as a lead to your CRM. Move the lead to the enrichment step of the Identify process and then to the Connect stage. Regardless of where the lead originated from, you need to enrich the lead before moving to the Connect stage. Enriching the lead with both demographic as well as interest data is critical toward understanding the lead s context and personalizing the sales experience accordingly. The enrichment data to capture is often unique to your Ideal Buyer Profile. It should include any information that will help you understand the buyer s interests and perspectives as they relate to your solution s value proposition. Enrichment data comes in two categories; information about the buyer s interests and information about the buyer s demographics. 7

8 Common enrichment data around the buyer s interests include: Information provided by the buyer in the lead form. The content the buyer has consumed from your company (web pages, blog articles, ebooks, etc.) The conversion event of the lead (i.e. demo request, free consultation request, free trial, ebook download, etc.) The lead nurturing s the buyer has received and which s were opened The source through which the buyer found your website Relevant commentary observed in the buyer s social media presence, or content they ve produced or was produced about them. Public information you can find about the company from 3rd parties Relevant information you can find about the company by speaking with their employees, customers, vendors, or partners. Common enrichment data around the buyer s demographics include: Title or role Industry Size of company (i.e. employees, revenue, etc.) Geographic location Longevity of the contact with the company If possible, configure your marketing software and website to capture this enrichment data automatically and add it directly to the lead record in your CRM. 8

9 VIDEO 3: EXAMPLE COMPANY #1 Welcome back everyone. Let s put everything together from the identify class into an example. We will use our Tyre Recruiting example from Class #1 and apply the Identify best practices to that company. First, Tyre Recruiting identifies their Ideal Buyer Profile. There are four components to their Buyer Profile: 1. Have a sales team 2. In the technology and healthcare industries 3. Based in the U.S. 4. Less than $100 million in revenue Next, Tyre Recruiting defines the steps their recruiters follow to identify leads to move to the connect stage. Remember, inbound sales teams always start with inbound leads that match their Ideal Buying Profile, as these leads are the most qualified for their business. Tyre recruiters start their identify process using the New Inbound Leads view in their CRM. This view shows all visitors to the Tyre Recruiting website that filled out a landing page and match their Ideal Buyer Profile. In order to match the leads to the Ideal Buyer Profile, Tyre Recruiting s CRM software appends company industry, size, and location data on each contact record. Any leads in the New Inbound Leads view are reviewed for fit, enriched, and moved to the Connect stage. If there are no inbound leads to call, Tyre recruiters check for Inbound Companies in their inbound company view. Their inbound company view shows the name of the company and the location of the visitor. The recruiter filters the list down to companies located in the U.S. Then they check each company against a 3rd party data source to verify the company has less than $100 million in revenue and is in either the healthcare or technology vertical. The recruiter also verifies that the company has a sales team by checking the roles of the people in the organization in LinkedIn. Any inbound companies that match the Inbound Buyer Profile are added to the CRM, enriched, and passed to the Connect stage. 9

10 If there are no inbound companies, Tyre recruiters check for trigger events. They search the major job board, specifically Indeed, LinkedIn, CareerBuiler, Monster, and The Ladders, looking for companies that posted a new sales opening. They also skim through TechCrunch for news about new funding. Any companies that have one of these trigger events and match their ideal buyer profile are added to the CRM, enriched, and passed to the Connect stage. If the recruiters do not find any qualified trigger events, they search for common connections. For example, they conduct an advanced search in LinkedIn, setting the relationship strength to 1st and 2nd connections and the industry to Pharmaceuticals. If they find a common connection to a company that matched their ideal buyer profile, the recruiters add the lead to the CRM noting the common connection, enrich the lead, and pass it to the Connect stage. If the recruiters do not find any common connections, they identify passive companies. In this case, Tyre recruiters use a 3rd party data source that allows them to filter companies by location, revenue, and industry. The recruiters add these passive leads to the CRM, enrich the leads, and pass them to the Connect stage. Once a lead is identified, Tyre recruiters move to the final step of the Identify process, enriching the lead. First, hey find the following demographic information about the company and add it to the CRM: industry, number of employees, revenue, city, state, company Twitter handle, URL of company blog, Company LinkedIn Page. Next, they identify the following contacts for each company and add them to the CRM: Head of Sales, CEO/President, Head of Recruiting. Finally, Tyre recruiters add the following demographic information to the CRM for each contact: Name, phone number and extension, address, title, years with the company, twitter handle, and LinkedIn profile. 10

11 At Tyre Recruiting, the following interest data is automatically captured and added to the appropriate company and contact records in their CRM: Visit source, lead conversion form data, conversion event(s), web pages visited, blog articles visited, s received, and s opened. Tyre recruiters spend 15 hours per week Identifying and Connecting with leads. They spend 5 hours per week social selling. They regularly read a few sales hiring blogs in their target industries and comment on new articles. For example, they read the Selling Power Magazine blog at looking for articles on sales hiring and recruiting. They belong to and monitor LinkedIn Groups related to sales recruiting. For example, they monitor the Sales Gravy LinkedIn group, which has over 30,000 members, looking for conversations about sales recruiting they can add value to. They follow thought leaders in their space in Twitter and re-tweet interesting comments. For example, they a content aggregator for pharmaceutical and medical sales professionals. Tyre recruiters also set a goal to submit one guest post per quarter to their company s blog. These continual efforts by Tyre recruiters allow them to identify more inbound leads and raise their credibility with buyers as they progress through the buying journey. VIDEO 4: EXAMPLE COMPANY #2 Welcome back everyone. Dan Tyre here, Sales Director at HubSpot. Let s apply all of the best practices shared in the Identify class to the marketing agency example, CoGrow Marketing. As shared in the first class, CoGrow Marketing is a 15 person marketing agency who provides a range of traditional advertising and online marketing services. They provide these services exclusively to professional services firms like legal, accounting and other specialized consulting firms. In the Identify stage, CoGrow Marketing first identifies their Ideal Buyer Profile. 11

12 There are four components to their Buyer Profile: 1. B2B professional services firms only 2. Law, accounting or other specialized firm. Excluding insurance, real estate and design/marketing firms. 3. Mid sized: 10 to 200 employees 4. Northeastern United States Next, CoGrow Marketing starts with the leads that have expressed an interest in talking to CoGrow. Since CoGrow has invested in their own inbound marketing efforts over the last two years, they not only generate 350 new inbound leads per month, they ve built up a database of about 8,000 opt-in contacts. Using marketing automation software to nurture contacts via , their website and online retargeting advertising, they also generate 50 marketing qualified leads each month. Marketing qualified leads are buyers who fit their ideal buyer profile definition who request a call or a consultation. In order to identify leads to move to the connect stage, CoGrow s two new business employees call the marketing qualified leads as soon as they request a call. They receive a text message, whenever a lead meets this criteria. One of the New business employees gets assigned any contact with a first name starting in A through M and the other receives an alert when a contact's first name starts with N through Z. The new business people also obsessively monitor their new inbound leads as well as leads that have recently re-visited their website. They ve created two views in their CRM to do this. The first is New Inbound Leads and the second is Recently Revisited Leads. These views show all visitors to the CoGrow Marketing website that filled out a form. In order to match the leads to the Ideal Buyer Profile, CoGrow Marketing s CRM software appends company industry, size, and location data on each contact record. Each morning, the new business salespeople review all leads in the New Inbound Leads and Recently Viewed Leads for fit. They then move them to the Connect stage. Although CoGrow doesn t cold call for new business, they don t sit back and wait for the right buyers to find them. Instead, they are actively involved in very targeted marketing efforts. Using proactive marketing and networking approaches, they identify companies who fit their ideal buyer profiles in a variety of ways. 12

13 LinkedIn is a primary way in which they market their own and their agency s expertise. They actively build connections on LinkedIn, participate in several LinkedIn groups and publish to LinkedIn Pulse. Using these methods, they can see who has viewed their profiles and their content on LinkedIn. They also drive a good amount of traffic to their website this way too. Any contact that engages with them via LinkedIn in a meaningful way is added to the CRM, enriched and moved to the connect stage. Another thing CoGrow s New Business people do is check for visitors of their website who have not yet converted, but who fit their buyer profile. Using HubSpot s prospects view, they can see the name of the company and the location of the visitor, but not the person who has visited. They first filter the list down to companies located in the Northeast U.S. Then they look at the company s website and linkedin page to ensure they are a b2b focused firm, not too big or too small. Any visitors from companies that match the Inbound Buyer Profile are added to the CRM, enriched, and passed to the Connect stage. Occasionally, CoGrow s new business people use trigger events as a way to find new contacts, or as reasons to reach out to existing contacts. Specifically, they use newsle. Newsle is a service that finds and displays news about any their contacts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. They also subscribe to the blogs of 100s of professional services firms using the feedly newsreader. They also leave comments and share content from these firms. When they scan the blogs and news sources, they are looking for things like new hires, the promotion of associates to new partners, opening of new offices or expansion of the new practice into new specialty areas. Just like any other new lead sources, when a company has one of these trigger events, they are added to the CRM, enriched, and passed to the Connect stage. CoGrow also receives lots of referrals from past and current clients. They give out a lot of referrals to their clients and they ask for referrals very proactively too. For example, other HubSpot partners are often asking them for their recommendation on law and accounting firms. They speak with many other HubSpot partners each year at local HubSpot user group events, the annual INBOUND conference and on a weekly mastermind call with 20 other partners. Since they specialize in working with law firms, accounting firms and other consulting firms, they are often asked if 13

14 they know someone who can help with x by other partners. Because they are always giving referrals, they are in a very good position to ask for them. So, they re always asking their clients who they know at other professional services firms. They often do LinkedIn searches first to identify the first degree connections of their clients, so they can ask for introductions to specific people. Once they get a referral, they add the lead to the CRM noting the connection, enrich the lead, and pass it to the Connect stage. They have a custom field in their CRM called referred by where they track the common connection, so they can see whose referrals close at the highest rate. Before CoGrow s inbound efforts were paying off, CoGrow used a 3rd party data source to find other mid-sized professional service firms in the Northeast. They contacted these firms as a last resort compared to the other warmer sources we already discussed. Once a lead is identified, CoGrow new business people move to the final step of the Identify process, enriching the lead. First, they find the following demographic information about the company and add it to the CRM: industry, number of employees, city, state, company Twitter handle, URL of company blog and Company LinkedIn Page. Next, they identify the following contacts for each company and add them to the CRM: associates, partners and anyone else that might be in charge of marketing, as mid sized firms occasionally hire an internal marketer. Finally, if they don t have it from a form completion, an introduction or LinkedIn, CoGrow new business people add the following demographic information to the CRM for each contact: Name, phone number and extension, address, title, years with the company, twitter handle, and LinkedIn profile. When contacts visit and convert on CoGrow Marketing website, the following interest data is automatically captured and added to the appropriate company and contact records in their CRM: Visit source, lead conversion form data, conversion event(s), web pages visited, blog articles visited, s received, and s opened. 14

15 In total, CoGrow s senior new business person spends 20 hours per week identifying and Connecting with leads. Their newer new business person spends almost all of their week on this activity. The owner and one of their more senior account managers manages all of the marketing initiatives for the agency s own marketing, which creates a lot of demand, making it easier for CoGrow s new business team to identify and connect with leads. The senior new business person and the owner run point on any opportunity they uncover while connecting. Over time, the owner plans to delegate all selling activities to the senior new business person, while eventually grooming their newest hire to the same role. In the next class, we ll cover how CoGrow can connect with these identified leads. 15