Sales mastery all starts with knowing your customer. Every business should have an ideal customer profile and documented buyer personas, which should be based on real research and customer conversations, not assumptions and guesswork.
High-performing sales teams are 2.1x more likely to be very good or outstanding at their prospect collaboration capabilities according to Salesforce research, while in-person communication still remains sales’ top channel for connecting with customers. Reply, a leading sales acceleration platform for SMBs provides sales professionals with a single environment to effectively collaborate on three main workflows, including inbound/outbound sales and cold outreach. In the journey to sales mastery and benefiting the customers, Reply aims to be a leader in disruptions in salestech.
In this interview, Reply’s CEO Oleg Campbell reveals about his excitement around how AI will continue to change sales, and his plans for Reply to be at the forefront of that change.
How could AI in sales and marketing further disrupt SaaS platforms? How do you prepare for the disruptive sales ecosystem?
AI is the key factor all businesses should be taking into account, especially in the SaaS sector. More business communication is being automated every day. For example, at Reply, we help our clients automate their sales emails and follow-ups. Our next goal is to automate responses using AI. Bots are already a common sight in customer support, with bots handling initial customer inquiries.
Soon, bot-to-bot sales will be a regular occurrence, with AIs communicating with each other to carry out transactions. It’s essential for any online business to keep tabs on this progress, so you’re taking advantage of the technology rather than reacting to it.
Thankfully, we’re seeing the price of AI and automation software fall to a level where any business can get started and then scale up their efforts.
How do we prepare for the disruptive sales ecosystem?
Simple.
We aim to be the disruption. I’m excited to see how AI will continue to change sales, and I plan for Reply to be at the forefront of that change.
How do you deliver conversations at scale to your customers?
Sales used to be exclusively a one to one. Whatever you bought, whether it was something as trivial as your groceries or as important as your first home, you’d be buying from someone who knew you by name. A salesperson had the opportunity to build a relationship with the customer, and the customer could build their trust in the salesperson.
Things have changed a lot since then, and today people regularly buy from people who live on the other side of the world, people they’ll never meet. A big part of what we do at Reply is allow our customer to automate the conversations they have with their customers.
Now, personal conversations and automation sound like contradictions, and they can be if you’re just spamming a list with sales emails. But there’s a better way. By carefully analyzing every step of the email process, we’ve identified the parts that can be automated while still keeping it easy to personalize the campaign, tailoring it to your recipient’s unique needs. Features like our 360 Contact View make it easier to get a complete picture of your contacts and their requirements, so you can get to know them one-to-one, by their first name rather than just their {firstname} tag.
How do you define and build “The Path to Sales Mastery” using CRM and automation?
Sales mastery all starts with knowing your customer. Every business should have an ideal customer profile and documented buyer personas, which should be based on real research and customer conversations, not assumptions and guesswork. Once you know your customer, automation is a lot easier and more effective.
Using the criteria you’ve found, you can use tools like Sales Navigator to target potential customers that are matching your profile. You can reach out to them with a value offer in their email or on the social networks they use, and create content that’s tailored for them.
A good CRM is essential, especially when it comes to email outreach. You want to have a clear view of your prospect and where they are in the funnel at all times.
For example, a campaign in Reply will typically include several follow-up messages, automated to go out several days after the previous email. However, if the prospect replies to an earlier message, you don’t want to bombard them with pointless follow-ups. Reply solves this by automatically canceling the follow-ups. But if you don’t know what stage your prospect is at, it’s all too easy to send them redundant messages. At best it’s a waste of time, at worst you might lose a customer you’d already won.
What makes Reply.io different from other sales technology platforms?
For a start, we’re invested in our customer’s success. I’m sure every company says that, but for us, it’s a key part of our business. We’re constantly working on improving our software, listening to our customers and giving them the features they need. For example, we recently added a team edition of Reply at no extra cost, making it easier for sales teams to use.
When it comes to specific features, I’ve heard great feedback on the preview function, which allows customers to easily personalize the emails they send. We’ve also spent a lot of time working on integrations, so Reply can easily slot into your sales stack and work seamlessly with your other tools.
Define the ‘State of Sales Transformation’ in 2018? How do you enable customers to adapt to this state quickly?
People are generally savvier and switched on when it comes to sales, especially in the B2B sector. You used to be able to throw in a couple of merge fields and your message would look 100% personalized. Now everyone is doing that and it’s lost its effectiveness, so salespeople really have to up their game. Our whole focus is on helping our customers create those one to one conversations that will stand out in an inbox overflowing with bland, irrelevant emails.
Along with providing the tools they need, we’re also educating our clients with regular practical content and resources like the Reply Academy. Technology and the resulting new regulations are changing the sales world on an almost daily basis, so keeping up-to-date is essential.
What are your B2B sales goals and how do you leverage sales enablement and readiness tools to achieve your goals?
Like most subscription-based businesses, we’re always looking to increase our MMR. To make sure we’re reaching our sales goals, we’ve divided this into two separate metrics: MRR as a result of inbound sales, and MRR as a result of outbound sales. This helps us see where our sales team is performing well, as well as where we may need to pay more attention. Both inbound and outbound are key components of our sales, so it’s important we can see how each one is working individually.
We use a number of tools to help us reach our goals. The main tools for sales we use are ProsperWorks (CRM), Reply (to follow up with inbound leads and outreach of outbound prospects), Drift (to automatically book meeting with qualified prospects right from the website), Hunter and Name2Email (finding email addresses) and many others. Actually, our SDR is always keeping an eye on the different apps out there and has spent the last three years compiling a catalog of 450+ of the best sales tools.
How should sales organizations strategize and deliver on their Contact Management and Revenue Management budget?
Company-wide, we invest 60% in product development, 20% into marketing and 20% in sales and customer success. In the future, we want to invest more in product development. Since innovation and building a high-quality product is our main core value, we believe creating a great product is the best marketing and sales strategy.
As I’ve mentioned previously, when it comes to contact management it’s crucial you invest in having a clear picture of your customers. Whether you’re using a spreadsheet or the latest CRM, you need to have all the relevant data on your contacts at your fingertips. Personally, that includes what stage they’re at in the buyer journey, along with all previous communication between us. This makes segmentation and personalized communication much easier.
For us, revenue management means supplying our service at a price that makes it an absolute no-brainer for our clients for the value they get out of our service. Individual clients benefit from a sliding scale pricing model, based on how many contacts they want to reach out to a month.
Our business clients instead pay based on the size of their team. In each case, we’re confident we can provide clear value while staying profitable. Allowing our clients to easily scale based on their demand has also helped, especially with our retention rates. It’s important for us to be cost-effective, whatever size clients we have.
Given the current shift in analytics and customer intelligence, what skills and knowledge do sales teams need to close deals faster?
We’re living in the age of Big Data, and salespeople are obsessed with collecting as many data points as they can. Don’t get me wrong, having plenty of data is great. But it’s not enough to just collect as much of it as possible; we need to keep in mind the real people behind the data. As I see it, sales teams need to keep their focus on the important data and stop paying attention to information that has no bearing on the sale. Do you really need to know someone’s favorite pizza topping to sell them accountancy software?
On a related note, it’s important to remember and respect people’s privacy. With Facebook’s recent controversies and GDPR coming into effect, more people than ever are concerned about who has access to what data. Even if you can legally use the data, be aware of how your customer feels about you using that data to sell to them. Will it build rapport, or will it destroy trust?
Finally, salespeople need the ability to translate that information into persuasive messages that actually mean something to the customer. It’s not enough to know their company size, their annual revenue, or any other data point. You need to know why that means something to them, and why it makes your product/solution the right one for them.