🎙️Transcript: Best Sales Development Tools to Use in 2015: Part II
BrightTalk
"Best Sales Development Tools to Use in 2015: Part II"
Sean Kester, David Dulany, Andrew McGuire, Ralph Barsi
June 4, 2015
Summary
This is the second installment of the Best Sales Development Tools webinar series presented via BrightTalk, following the January 2015 Part 1 session.
Ralph Barsi opens by clarifying that none of the panelists are paid to endorse these tools (except Sean for SalesLoft products Prospector and Cadence), and mentions tools from Part 1 including Datanyze, Maillift, DiscoverOrg, Rivalry, and Bitly.
He references the recently published Bryan Gonzalez article from TOPO titled "Sales Development Technology: The Stack Emerges" as important context for understanding the technology stack concept as it relates to sales development.
Andrew McGuire from Zendesk presents two complementary tools: Kimono Labs (free tool that converts any website data into CSV files using point-and-click API creation, particularly useful for extracting speaker lists, attendee lists, and vendor information from events like Rainmaker 2016 and Dreamforce, plus SEC filing data for publicly traded companies) and Twofer (email finding tool that takes first name, last name, and domain to return valid email addresses).
David Dulany from Infer discusses Switch Merge (creates personalized videos in under a minute by pulling prospect's name and LinkedIn photo into customized product demos, particularly effective at conferences and for outbound campaigns with higher click-through rates than standard emails) and demonstrates using predictive analytics to audit SDR activity, revealing surprising insights that his team was spending equal time on A/B leads as C/D leads despite having reliable scoring models, and using similar messaging across all tiers.
Sean Kester presents Calendly (calendar scheduling tool that integrates with Gmail/Outlook, allowing prospects to self-schedule demos directly on AE calendars, eliminating 17+ steps and back-and-forth that causes deals to drop from momentum loss, recently added multiple calendar integration and premium features) and delivers an extended discussion on LinkedIn Groups as underutilized social business tools, emphasizing the Sales Hacker Community and proper etiquette (treat it like a cocktail reception, don't oversell, listen first, share valuable content, maintain routine participation to build personal brand).
Ralph Barsi closes with Charlie (free app that sends pre-meeting briefings one hour before scheduled meetings with aggregated intelligence from tweets, news, and social media about contacts, learned about from John Barrows) and Momentum (free Chrome extension providing daily focus prompts with landscape images, "What is your main focus for the day?" question, inspiring quotes, and to-do lists on every new tab, addressing the critical barrier of lack of focus in sales).
The panel commits to a year-end wrap-up session and encourages audience recommendations for tools to feature.
BIG Takeaways
Use Kimono Labs to Extract Event Attendee and Speaker Data Into Actionable Lists
Kimono Labs is a free tool that allows non-technical users to create APIs (application programming interfaces) through point-and-click functionality, converting any website data into CSV files without requiring coding knowledge.
Andrew McGuire discovered it while trying to build a March Madness bracket app and realized its prospecting power.
This is particularly valuable for events like Rainmaker 2016, Dreamforce, or any conference with published speaker/attendee/vendor lists on websites.
Click on the person's name, title, and company name - Kimono scrolls through every page and pulls data into a CSV. If speakers are listed, you can even capture the topics they're presenting on, enabling highly relevant outreach about their subject matter expertise.
Kimono also provides pre-built SEC filing extraction for 35,000-40,000 publicly traded companies, allowing you to build outreach campaigns based on quarterly financial data - particularly effective when targeting CFOs and C-suite executives. This eliminates paying someone to manually scrape data or wasting intern/admin time on tedious list building.
Combine Kimono Labs With Twofer for Complete Event-Based Prospecting Campaigns
After extracting names, titles, and companies from event websites using Kimono Labs, the next challenge is finding valid email addresses.
Twofer solves this by taking three simple columns in a spreadsheet (first name, last name, domain) and returning validated email addresses. Upload your Kimono-generated CSV to Twofer, and it automatically finds and verifies emails so you have a complete, actionable prospecting list.
Andrew notes the limitation that Twofer doesn't connect to Salesforce, so you're still disconnected from your CRM, but it works well for quick marketing campaigns or event-based outreach blasts. Contact Andrew at Zendesk to be connected with the right people at both Kimono (free tool with support on their site) and Twofer.
The combined workflow: Kimono extracts event data → Twofer finds emails → upload to your outreach tool → execute event-based campaigns with highly relevant context.
Use Switch Merge to Create Personalized Video Demos in Under a Minute
David Dulany worked with Andrew Agnes (CEO of Switch Merge) to develop a tool for conference floor prospecting at Serious Decisions. The problem: standing behind a booth hoping people approach you is passive and ineffective.
The solution: walk the floor actively engaging prospects, capture their email address, and within one minute Switch Merge creates a customized video pulling in their name and LinkedIn photo, weaving it into a story about your product benefits. This differentiates you from "boring emails" and even the once-effective "breakup emails" and "have you been eaten by crocodiles" tactics that have become stale.
Click-through rates are significantly higher with personalized video. You can also apply this against your existing database - it links up with Salesforce lead/contact records, so you pop in an email, send outbound, and they receive a personalized video. David can connect you with CEO Andrew Agnes for a demo. The key insight: in an era of email fatigue, video personalization cuts through noise.
Use Predictive Analytics to Audit SDR Activity Distribution and Messaging Tiering
David Dulany conducted eye-opening research using Infer's predictive analytics platform after joining the company.
The question: Are internal SDRs spending time in the right places and prioritizing correctly? The shocking discovery: SDRs were spending approximately equal time (similar number of touches, outbound calls, and emails) on A/B leads as they were on C/D leads, despite having a "pretty solid, reliable model" that predicted which accounts/contacts/leads would close at higher ratios.
Even more surprising: SDRs were using similar messaging across all tiers rather than customizing for lead quality. David emphasizes transparency and accountability - he shares these bar graphs directly with the SDR team, framing it positively as data-driven course correction rather than a "witch hunt."
The data is "bits and bytes, not gut feeling," enabling more informed decisions. His immediate action items: (1) Redistribute SDR effort to match lead quality, (2) Develop tiered messaging appropriate for A/B/C/D contacts, (3) Adjust SLAs and cadences based on lead score. This is "low hanging fruit" for immediate performance improvement.
Implement Calendly to Eliminate the 17+ Steps Between "Yes" and Booked Demo
Sean Kester identifies a critical friction point: once a prospect says yes to a demo, there are typically 17+ additional steps before it's actually booked in Salesforce/CRM - picking times, checking rep calendars, back-and-forth emails, phone tag, potential day-long delays. Momentum gets lost and deals drop through cracks.
Calendly solves this by hooking directly into Gmail or Outlook calendars and providing a custom link you insert in email footers or anywhere in correspondence. Prospects click, see available time slots (customizable for 15-minute, 30-minute, or custom durations), self-select a time, and it automatically books.
Originally SalesLoft SDRs used it for their own calendars as an experiment, discovering 2-3 times per week prospects who'd never been reached would self-schedule.
The game-changer: Calendly recently added multiple calendar integration, allowing SDRs to sync AE calendars for round-robin scheduling or pod-based assignment. Prospects from six months ago sometimes circle back and self-schedule without any additional outreach. Available in free and premium versions. Connect with CEO Tope (located down the hall from SalesLoft) through Sean.
Calendly adds "hours to our work week" in productivity and prevents 1-2 prospects per week from slipping away.
Leverage LinkedIn Groups as Underutilized Social Business Tools With Proper Etiquette
Sean Kester calls LinkedIn Groups "one of the most powerful social business tools on the web" but notes most people don't approach them correctly. His favorite: Sales Hacker Community, a "power group" of sales development leaders, reps, and practitioners "on the grind every single day."
The value: (1) Monitor discussions to see hot topics and industry trends - many tools discussed on this webinar originated in these groups; (2) Realize you're not alone in your struggles - others face the same tactical challenges and management issues; (3) Learn best practices from actual practitioners; (4) Identify patterns like the perpetually hot "SDR to AE handoff" topic (Tom Lee from FlipTop started a pinned discussion with 20+ comments that kept growing).
Critical etiquette - treat it like a cocktail reception: Don't be "that wasted guy in the corner being all loud." Be casual, patient, post good information, listen, give back when you have knowledge, be classy. DON'T post on every thread, DON'T sell your product (fastest way to lose rapport), DO share valuable articles (like the Forbes piece legitimizing sales development as profession), DO maintain routine posting (weekly/monthly, not too much or too little).
The meta-benefit: building your personal brand as educated, willing to learn, good input, willing to try new things. David Dulany adds he's made friends offline through the group, leading to lunches and deeper relationships.
Use Charlie and Momentum to Maintain Focus and Prepare for Prospect Conversations
Ralph Barsi presents two tools addressing the "biggest barrier for salespeople hitting quota: lack of focus." Charlie (free app, learned from John Barrows) integrates with your calendar and sends an email one hour before each scheduled meeting with aggregated intelligence on attendees - recent tweets, news, social media activity.
If meeting Sean in two hours, Charlie captures Sean's tweet from earlier that day and consolidates it into a briefing package. This enables relevant, current conversation starters and keeps focus on the prospect's world, not your product. Ralph's challenge: SDRs should be able to conduct a 20-minute call without talking about their offering at all, focusing entirely on understanding prospect pain.
Charlie, InsideView, DiscoverOrg, ZoomInfo - these intelligence apps must be "used optimally" to build credibility and rapport. Momentum (free Chrome extension) addresses the distraction epidemic that Darren Hardy (Success Magazine publisher) identifies as "the number one impediment to success."
Every new Chrome tab displays a landscape image, time, personalized greeting, and prompts: "What is your main focus for the day?" Plus inspiring quotes at bottom that Ralph frequently shares on Twitter/LinkedIn, generating engagement because people "resonate with that" presence and centeredness. David Dulany notes seeing it on colleagues' screens and wondering what it was - validates its visual appeal and effectiveness.
Transcript
Ralph Barsi (00:03):
Hello everybody. This is Ralph Barsi from Achievers. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever you are in the world, we are thrilled to have you with us today. This is round two of the best sales development tools to use in 2015. Again, I am joined by Andrew McGuire from Zendesk. Hello, Andrew.
Andrew McGuire (00:25):
Hello, Ralph. Nice to meet everybody.
Ralph Barsi (00:28):
And I'm also joined by Sean Kester from SalesLoft. How are you, Sean?
Sean Kester (00:34):
Good, Ralph. Hope everyone's doing well today.
Ralph Barsi (00:37):
And finally, David Dulany from Infer. David, how are you today?
David Dulany (00:42):
Doing well, Ralph. Thanks so much. Thanks everybody for joining us.
Ralph Barsi (00:47):
Again, we're really excited everybody to be with you today. We promise to make the very best of your time. We did this webinar in January of this year. We went through a number of tools and technologies that we're using on the front lines and benefiting from. And I'll tell you right now, we are not paid to mention or endorse any of these, with the exception of maybe Prospector and Cadence down there, since Sean is the head of product over at SalesLoft. Other than that though, these are really hot tools and technologies that we have all benefited from, including Datanyze, Maillift, DiscoverOrg, Rivalry, Bitly, really cool stuff. And it's timely too, because as you all know, sales development teams continue to scale and that means the need for a technology stack is becoming more and more critical. There are a lot of writings about the technology stack out there.
(01:45):
It's not a new concept, but as it relates to sales development, it's pretty new and it's pretty relevant for right now. The most recent writing about the stack came from Bryan Gonzalez, who's an analyst at TOPO here in the Bay Area. And he talked about sales development technology, the stack emerges. So go ahead and Google that one. It's a very good read and it will bring you up to speed on what it is that we're talking about today. So I'm going to go ahead and kick things off with Mr. Andrew McGuire from Zendesk. Andrew, take it away. You can go ahead and advance your slides as you'd like. And oh, actually one more thing. If anybody has questions, I promise that the four of us will address each and every question that comes across the wire. So do not hesitate to write in your questions.
(02:37):
If we cannot get to them live at the end of this session, I promise we will respond to everybody and everything. So thanks again for joining us and Andrew, take it away.
Andrew McGuire (02:48):
Thanks, Ralph. Welcome everyone. And thank you for joining us this morning, this afternoon, as Ralph said, this evening, wherever you may be. I've been at Zendesk now for the last about four years. Zendesk is a customer support software application, helping organizations all over the world manage any support interaction they may have. And one of the things that I get passionate about is sales tools and sales efficiency. And to me, one of the biggest challenges that everyone has is data quality, finding new leads, closing a deal. These are all topics we care about. And one of the biggest things that we do at Zendesk is go to events or we leverage other events that we may not even be going to like Rainmaker 2016 next year for SalesLoft. We may be going to and on their website, they may have a list of people. And one of the biggest things that I've found to generate interest, get highest response rates is from going through an application called Kimono Labs.
(03:54):
And some of you may think I'm crazy, but an API is a technical term that I didn't really understand. An API is, we always say open API, but really what's the difference between an open and a closed API? I don't know. But an open API with Kimono Labs will allow you to go to any website with data on that website and turn it into a CSV file. So when you're looking at a speaker list or an attendee list or vendors attending something like Dreamforce, you can use this application to point and click to what data you want to pull. So you'll see on the screen here, we've got a list from an event this year where I click on the person's name, it highlights that, then I can click on the title, the company name, and what happens is it can scroll through every single page from that event and pull it into a CSV file to where I now have, if I have the name, the title, the company, and even some of these people are speakers, right?
(04:56):
So I can get the actual topics they're speaking about and pull that into a CSV file, which is going to allow me to use a variety of different tools to send outbound messages about what they're speaking about and try and set up time in order to get a meeting with them while they're at that event. Whether we're going or not, one of the biggest things I've found is by generating interest from someone who wants to speak or someone that's attending an event, you can leverage that into an email that will allow you to say, "Hey, let's meet up. Let's have a conversation before going to the event," or using it afterwards. It's just another reason to get in contact with someone and rather than paying somebody to manually go through this or spending your time having an intern or admin pull stuff off of events, using Kimono Labs to point and click and create your own API and you can duplicate that across a variety of different sites and one thing that they have on top of that is they've built out the SEC filing.
(06:00):
So you could actually go to Kimono Labs. There's a whole section for the top, I think 35 to 40,000 publicly traded companies and you could start generating emails based on financials that are happening. And I found that with the C-suite and the CFO in particular, building information off of what they are reporting on a quarterly basis is key and digging into the SEC site is a pain. So using the Kimono Labs SEC product along with this speaker list and pulling that information into a CSV allows you to do what I have next here, which is, as you can see, into a spreadsheet here with the CSV and this is where you can export it to variety of different tools and download it if you need to. Now the tool that I use to go out and gather and find emails is called Twofer. But before I get into that, I'm curious, Sean, Ralph, Dave, have any of you guys gone to an event or had a speaker list or had any other experience where you've had a success contacting someone about going to an event?
Sean Kester (07:10):
Yeah, I have, Andrew. We try to do it before every event that we do and marketing usually leads the initiative there, but it kind of aligns with what is a new hot trend now, which is account based marketing. If you can get a list of the sponsors, you can get a list of the speakers or even a list of the attendees, you can use social media, find their contact information, put them in an outbound touchpoint cadence, and then reach out to them in order to either schedule a meeting beforehand or get some interest building before the event.
Andrew McGuire (07:46):
Yeah. And one of the biggest challenges I've found is just combining it into, and getting that data off of the web. And so that's where Kimono Labs can help. And then there's a variety of tools to find email addresses that we could talk about, but one that I have used that I wanted everybody to be aware of is Twofer. It's just that name.com and you can easily just upload first name, last name, domain, and it goes out and finds email addresses and you can pull it back and then you have a CSV that is full of the valid email addresses that you can now email people through, whatever tool it might be that you could use. So Twofer is a pretty basic tool, but it's pretty powerful in the sense that if you have three columns in a spreadsheet, first name, last name, domain, it will go out, find that valid email and return it to you.
(08:30):
So that's all I have for the team today. I'm going to hand it over to our friend Dave Dulany.
Ralph Barsi (08:37):
Hey Andrew, real quick before we do that, has anybody inquired about where you found or how you found either Kimono or Twofer?
Andrew McGuire (08:48):
Yeah. So Kimono, I stumbled upon on my own when I was trying to figure out how to build something. I started actually learning code, trying to figure out how to build something on my own. And somebody pointed me to Kimono Labs because funny enough, they have a March Madness app. So you can build your own March Madness app with brackets using what they pull off of ESPN and that's how I started looking at it and then found, wow, I can point and click and pull stuff off of a website for prospecting. It's not just for our office pool for March Madness. So that was how I found Kimono and I've been using it ever since.
Ralph Barsi (09:30):
Awesome.
Andrew McGuire (09:33):
Yeah. Twofer, I came across that. Somebody had pointed me to it about a year, year and a half ago now as a way to just quickly get email addresses. But one of the challenges with it is it's not connected to Salesforce, so you're still disconnected from your CRM, but it does give you those valid emails if you're trying to do a quick marketing campaign and upload them into a marketing campaign. So there are some downsides to it, but it does work. It does work well if you're just trying to get a list of emails to blast people before an event.
Ralph Barsi (10:03):
And if anyone inquires about using Kimono Labs or Twofer, do you know anybody at those companies that you can help connect them with?
Andrew McGuire (10:14):
Yeah, Kimono is free. So Kimono, it's not an application that you'd be charged for. They have support on their site. And if anybody does have questions about what I've done, I'd be willing to talk to them about it. So it's just Andrew at Zendesk and same thing with Twofer. I can connect you with the right people over there and they've got a good team supporting them as well. So either way, it's just Andrew at Zendesk and I can point you in the right direction if you've got questions.
Ralph Barsi (10:39):
Perfect. And you'll notice everybody that as we segue from presenter to presenter, we're including the contact information, at least the LinkedIn profile, URL, as well as the Twitter profile. And then at the very end, we've got everybody's email addresses if you need to reach any of us directly. For examples like this, what Andrew said, if you're going to need help with getting the best out of Kimono Labs or Twofer or any of the offerings you learn about today, that's how to do it. On to David Dulany. Thanks, Andrew.
Andrew McGuire (11:09):
Thank you, sir.
David Dulany (11:11):
Great. Thank you, Ralph, and thanks Andrew. Those are some great tips. I know that I've struggled in the past to build up the momentum going into events. And one of the big things that we've struggled with is trying to get the contact information, so super useful. I can use those right away. As I said, Ralph, thanks again. My name's David Dulany. I joined Infer about three or four weeks ago, so I'm relatively new and really excited though just from being an SDR manager for several years. I was excited about what Infer was doing, applying predictive analytics to sales and marketing data and leveraging the internal and external data to help SDRs, MDR sales reps prioritize accounts, contacts and leads. And I'll talk a little bit about how I use predictive in a bit here, but actually the first tool that I want to take a look at is something that we have used in the past at events.
(12:22):
When I first started, I basically got on an airplane and went out to Serious Decisions and we really wanted to strategize and see how we could leverage our time on the floor in the best way possible. Had a couple of SDRs there, had some sales reps, and we didn't want to just kind of stand behind the booth and hope that some people come and talk to us. So we worked with Andrew Agnes, who's the CEO of Switch Merge, and developed a really cool little tool that we could walk around the sales floor with at this conference. And as we were talking to people, we could pop their email address into the Switch Merge tool, and it creates a little customized video that we could use to kind of demo the Infer product, and it's pretty simple. You just basically put in a little email address, and within about a minute, it creates a video that pulls in their name, their photo from LinkedIn, if they can find it, and it weaves it into a story about the benefits of your product.
(13:43):
So we just found it really easily used, and we got a great response at the show. You can also use it to apply against your current database of email addresses, and so obviously it links up with your Salesforce lead or contact record. You pop in the email, you send them an outbound email, and they get a little personalized video in their email.
(14:16):
I think everyone on the call probably understands the diminishing returns of just boring emails that we send on an outbound basis, and even the funny breakup email, the crocodiles, have you been eaten by crocodiles and things like that are getting a little bit stale. So this is something that clients have seen a higher click through rate, as you can see there, and we're getting a good response from and rolling out on a bigger scale. So that's the first one that I wanted to look at, and I can hook you up again with Andrew, the CEO, over at Switch Merge, if anybody wants to do a quick demo of it. Any questions on that?
Ralph Barsi (15:07):
No questions as of yet on that, but that's helpful to learn about. I didn't know about it.
David Dulany (15:14):
Yeah, it's a fun product and it's definitely, if you're trying to increase your click through rates on the outreach, it's something that can help. And next up is some research that I've been doing using predictive analytics here at Infer, and this is something that can be applied across different predictive analytic platforms. I obviously use Infer and we didn't actually have predictive analytics plugged into our database at my last company, so I was really chomping at the bit to get my hands on this data when I came in. Infer only recently had enough data to build a solid model on their lead and contact to close one data. And so now that they've got a pretty solid model, one of my questions coming in, and something that I've always been wondering is, how are our internal SDRs using the database? Are they spending time in the right place?
(16:22):
Are they prioritizing and can we dig in on the messaging that they're sending depending on the quality of the contacts that are in our database? And as you can see, I got a few question marks here. I was a little taken aback by the results when I was digging in.
(16:45):
Why were we spending as much time on A and B leads or contacts or accounts in our database as we were on Cs and Ds? That didn't make a lot of sense to me. I looked into the messaging that the outbound team was sending and we were using similar messaging across the board, whether it was a really perfect contact for us or something that we should never have been calling on in the first place. And then, you know, I kind of was digging into the different SLA and cadences that we were using. And again, it was the same kind of across the board. So the data is guiding me to where I need to go and spend time with the team now over the next few months to really help them to prioritize and craft the messaging and SLAs correctly for the type of people that we're reaching out to.
Ralph Barsi (17:51):
David, are you pretty transparent with this information with the sales development team? Are you showing them these bar graphs, for example?
David Dulany (18:00):
Absolutely. And it's something that I really believe in is accountability and transparency and it's like, you know, actually something that I learned from you, Ralph, is let's bring it out, let's talk about it, let's keep it super positive and use the information to move forward. The great thing about data is that it's, as long as you trust the data, which I've got a pretty high level of trust with this, I know that it's bits and bytes, you know, it's not my gut feeling and I can rely on the data to make more informed decisions.
Ralph Barsi (18:45):
Good stuff. Great. No pun intended, but it's okay to open up the kimono. Let the sales development team see what's going on.
David Dulany (19:00):
Yeah. I mean, let's look at it, let's talk about it and you know, it's definitely not like a witch hunt. It's just looking at the data and then understanding where we're spending our time and making course corrections and you know, that's what it's all about.
Sean Kester (19:19):
Hey David, this is Sean. I got a question for you. What did you find to be one of the most surprising trends or something you wouldn't have guessed that happened when you started looking at all this data?
David Dulany (19:33):
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's just the main thing that kind of made me want to talk about this on the webinar was the fact that we've got a pretty solid, reliable model. We know what accounts, contacts and leads are going to close at a higher ratio, but yet when I dug into this, I could see that we were putting an average number of touches, outbound calls and emails against the A, B, C, and D at the same level, pretty much the same level. And so for me, I mean, that's low hanging fruit coming in and it's something I actually haven't had up to this point and it was just easy and empowering to say, "Hey guys, I mean, how does this even make sense? Let's look at this." And then beyond that, it's like, "Hey, let's look at our messaging." I mean, then if we're sending all the same messaging to the same priority leads and contacts, then that makes absolutely no sense.
(20:39):
That's an easy fix.
Sean Kester (20:43):
Yeah, that's awesome. Great. Thanks.
Ralph Barsi (20:48):
Very good. Thank you, David.
Sean Kester (20:50):
Sure.
Ralph Barsi (20:51):
Appreciate it. We will move right along here. Again, just a reminder, the questions that do come in, if we don't get an opportunity to address them all today, on the webinar that is, we will absolutely address each question via email. So with that, let's move forward with Sean Kester in Atlanta, Georgia. How's it going out there today?
Sean Kester (21:15):
Man, it's good today. A little cloudy. Definitely hot down here.
Ralph Barsi (21:21):
Well, we're happy to have you, Sean.
Sean Kester (21:23):
Cool. Yeah, thanks, man. I'm excited to be here. My name's Sean Kester. Recently moved over to head up the product team here at SalesLoft from the sales development side. And so I want to take us in two different directions. One's going to be kind of a tactical tool that you can use, another one's going to be a little more squishy. So we can go ahead and jump on into the first tool, which is one we couldn't live without, and it's called Calendly. So one of the, I guess, age old problems with sales development, and a lot of it is keeping up the process flow and the communication with prospects. And one of the biggest pains we've found really in the whole process is around once you get someone to say yes to you, there's another 17 steps you've got to accomplish before you can get that demo booked into Salesforce or into your CRM, picking out time is a huge battle, logging all those things, checking the rep's calendar, then going back to them with other times.
(22:24):
They may take a day to get back to you. You're calling them on the phone, you're shooting them over an email, and it may just kind of drop the ball on the whole thing because you've lost that momentum. And so one of the tools that we use is called Calendly. And so Calendly hooks up directly into your Gmail calendar or I believe Outlook calendar and it allows you to insert a custom link into your email footer or anywhere else you want it in your email and you can easily send that out to prospects when they're trying to choose times. And so on it, you can really customize, do I want 15 minute meeting options? Do I want 30 minute meeting options? How far do I want to go? And what do these options have in them? So you can put some custom links to a join.me or any other service that you use for webinars or kind of doing screen shares and make it as easy as possible in order to do it.
(23:27):
And so when we first started using it as SDRs, we didn't really see the whole functionality with it because we wanted to have it for the AEs calendar and at the time it didn't integrate with multiple calendars. So we started throwing it in there as an experiment and saying, "Well, if I throw in this calendar invite at the end of my email, I ask them for some time, maybe they'll click on it and actually give me some, and then it's up to me to figure out if it can go on a rep's calendar or not." And sure enough, two to three times a week, you'd get an email invite from somebody that you had never spoken to before or maybe they'd kind of brushed you off on the phone and you send an email over to them requesting a 30 minute demo. And so we found it to heighten the productivity value, but now that they've added these new features that integrate multiple calendars, it allows you to take your AE's calendars, either the ones that you're assigned to or ones that are in your pod or you do round robin fashion and it opens up the available times in those days so they can easily see, well, I've got time on Thursday afternoon, there's four slots that are open.
(24:27):
Yep, that one works for me. Sends them the information, sends you an email, then you can go ahead and log that in Salesforce and move on your merry way. But it's about being more efficient, making it more easy. You don't drop the ball on anything. And honestly, once in a while you'll get someone from like six months ago who finally comes back around and just schedules some time on your calendar for a demo without you having to reach back out to them again. And so their CEO Tope, he's actually right down the hall from us. They've got a great business and they're really in tune with the customer. And if it's something you're interested in, I'd love to introduce you, but it's added hours to our work week and our productivity and you know, it's hard to put the raw data on it, but I guarantee you it's made sure that one or two prospects hadn't slipped through the cracks that might have before.
Ralph Barsi (25:19):
Sean, how long have you guys-
Sean Kester (25:20):
You got any questions on this at all?
Ralph Barsi (25:22):
Real quick, how long ago did your team start using it? When you first started using it just for the AEs?
Sean Kester (25:29):
About a year ago.
Ralph Barsi (25:31):
And so it looks like they've been pretty innovative in the last 12 months in breaking out multiple calendars, et cetera.
Sean Kester (25:40):
Yeah, they're super, they pivot really well when customers give feedback on them and it was all free until just recently. So now they have a premium version, which does some of those cool things. They do have a basic free version that just allows you to send out kind of one offs on your own.
Ralph Barsi (25:56):
That's awesome.
Andrew McGuire (25:58):
So Sean, you were saying before that you can put links into join.me. At Zendesk we have group webinars for prospects that just want to see a standard demo. Can you do that? And if so, how do you do that with this product?
Sean Kester (26:14):
You know, group demos is an interesting idea and actually what I've played around with before. We've never implemented it, but you can add to any one of those invites, any additional information that you want to, instructions, links to whatever. So when they click on it, they get a confirmation email, it pulls in all that extra info that you want to add as well, and adds it to their invite as well as to yours.
Andrew McGuire (26:35):
Got it. So you could even use this for events, right? So if I'm going to an event and I have blocks of time and then I could block it off for 30 minutes during that time and try and proactively get people to sign up for the time slots you have for the day you're at the event, right?
Sean Kester (26:49):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think salespeople use it, like coaches use it, financial services, interview scheduling. We do it for when people have only custom times for interviews and what's cool is you can say, I want 15 minute SDR review meetings, right? And you tell your SDRs, "Hey, you can only schedule these 15 minute meetings with me." And you can say, "These meeting times only exist from 2:00 to 4:00 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays." And they have to go in and schedule it or same thing for meetings or however you want to customize it.
(27:23):
Yeah. I mean, it's super dynamic. I'm telling you, you should check it out. So I'm going to move along and so that's kind of the tactical tool that you can use. It's free or paid. If you want to get in touch with Tope, their CEO, I'd be happy to make the introduction. But this next topic is kind of around, it's a tool that people use, but I don't think they look at it in the same way that they could or should, and that's LinkedIn groups. So everyone uses LinkedIn. It's a great database to find professional information. You can connect with people, you can have these networks, and there's this concept of groups. And I truly believe it's one of the most powerful social business tools on the web. And I'm not going to talk to you about social selling and that whole fad, and I'm not going to tell you my opinion on all of that, but what it does allow you to do is connect with these thought leaders and people that are in one space.
(28:25):
And so they have this concept of power groups. And one of my favorite power groups is the Sales Hacker community, which if you're not connected in and you're in sales development, you need to be, because it's a community of sales development leaders and reps, practitioners, the people that are on the grind every single day, and they're in this group really just to learn from each other and to kind of commune around each other. And so you can listen and monitor these discussions, you see what hot topics are going down. One of the things that I love the most about it is, everyone kind of feels isolated sometimes with their problems within their organizations or things that they're struggling with, tactically as even a rep or as a manager, some of the management best practices and all that. And when you find when you go to one of these groups is that you're not the only one who's doing it and you're not the only one who's trying to learn.
(29:17):
And so everyone kind of comes in in one community and you can learn best practices from each other, you can get feedback on things, you can throw some ideas out there that'll come back to you, but you listen and monitor these discussions, you see trends in the industry and a lot of the tools that we're talking about on this thing have been mentioned in this group before in one of the other groups and you can really gain a lot of insight. An important thing to note that a lot of people really don't take into consideration is there's an etiquette to being online and you want to treat it like a cocktail reception. Like you're not going to show up to a happy hour after a conference and be that wasted guy in the corner who's being all loud and telling everyone he knows exactly what he's doing.
(29:58):
You want to be kind of casual, you come in, you post some good information, you listen, you're patient, you're not posting on every single thread and just giving your two cents because you can. You really want to take it as an opportunity to learn from some people, to give back when you have some knowledge and to be a little classy. So some ways to do that is you can start a discussion. Just as the example right here, which was a hot topic was the handoff from SDR to AE. That's probably one of the hottest topics in sales development is how do you hand things off? When does the ownership lie? How do you log it into Salesforce? And that's why it's pinned to the top. So Tom Lee started this conversation, he had a great thought and expounded on that. You can see there's 20 something comments and the thread keeps going on and you can monitor those things and kind of see what's going on, put your two cents in.
(30:51):
Another thing is to kind of share and amplify yourself and kind of the trade itself, sales development. And you can share a good article. One of my favorite ones was a Forbes article that was written about, I guess within the past four to six months about how sales development's really taking off and it's kind of the theme of this year. And it really gave legitimacy to not only what we do, but the industry itself and the practice. And so you can share those things and all of a sudden you kind of build your own brand or you're kind of building up being in that trusted advisor status. And in order to maintain that, you've got to keep it routine. And so if you can post on these things every week or every month, going back to treating it like a cocktail reception, you don't want to do it too much, but you also don't want to do it too little.
(31:43):
And you really have that opportunity to drive your personal brand, which I think is super important as an up and coming sales development rep or a new manager is that you want to be known in the industry as someone who is educated, who's willing to learn more, who has good input, who's willing to try some things out because best practices are not set in stone. And people love it when people come in and they're little movers and shakers and they're doing some things. And I think disruptive might be one of those hot topic words. But if you're not in LinkedIn groups and you're not taking advantage of kind of the communities that are built there, I would definitely advise you to do so.
Ralph Barsi (32:23):
Amen, brother. I think LinkedIn groups is very underrated. And for those who are unfamiliar with LinkedIn groups, I can't underscore enough the importance of what Sean said about approaching the groups the right way, getting involved in the groups, being someone that comes in at first listening and understanding what's going on in the marketplace. Tom Lee, for example, he's a well known sales development leader and speaker. He's here in the Bay Area at FlipTop. And as Sean mentioned, this is a super hot topic that was pinned to the top. And I think here on the screen it says roughly 20, 21 comments. And I know it's gone way beyond that. That was a really hot conversation. And also you'll see the tabs beneath Sales Hacker Community where it says promotions, jobs. That's where you're going to go ahead and post an article if you have one, that's where you can look for jobs or post jobs if you'd like.
(33:21):
It's just a great forum and venue to keep your finger on the pulse of what's going on, especially in sales development and in the market. And for any bloggers out there, LinkedIn Groups is a fabulous place to go find out what everybody's talking about and what's resonating with the overall audience and it leads to great topics for future articles that you might want to publish. So yeah, I could go all day as well on LinkedIn groups. This is a great one, Sean.
Sean Kester (33:51):
Thanks man. And I think to echo you blogging, I mean, that's something that I didn't even put in here to think about and that's an excellent point. There's been many blogs written off threads of this specific group, which is just testament to how good the conversations are. The last thing I'm going to say on this that I forgot to is don't sell your product. It's not what the forum's meant to do. And don't let yourself fall into that trap, especially when a group has to do with what it is that you serve or the solution that you have because that's probably the fastest way to lose any rapport that you would have worked hard to build up until that point.
Ralph Barsi (34:26):
Yeah. And speaking of that and of building your rapport and credibility, hey, why don't you listen to what the conversations are and identify the patterns that you're finding in these groups. Maybe the handoff from SDR to AE is a recurring topic, for example. That way if you're a sales development rep and you're selling specifically to sales development leaders or sales leaders, you're going to be able to have a very worthwhile conversation with them once you do engage with them about what the hot topics are in the industry and how do those relate to their business. And you start turning the table on to their organization and what problems they and their teams might be running into.
Sean Kester (35:09):
Exactly.
Ralph Barsi (35:09):
By watching the patterns in these groups.
David Dulany (35:14):
Yeah. And Sean, I was just thrilled that you were bringing up LinkedIn groups because I've been working with the SDRs here to introduce them to the groups. And I love how you say treat it like a cocktail reception because you don't want to be that guy at the networking event who's going around shoving business cards and pitching your service. Exactly like you guys said, you want to learn from the group, learn what the business issues are in the community. And just one last quick note is, I've made friends offline with people from, especially from the Sales Hacker community, just reading their comments, really respecting the value that they're bringing to the group and then pinging them and being like, "Hey, let me buy you lunch." And it's a great way to get offline and go meet people in that respect as well.
Ralph Barsi (36:17):
Love it. We love it too. All right.
Sean Kester (36:20):
Cool. Well, with that, I'm going to pass it over to Ralph.
Ralph Barsi (36:24):
Cool. Thank you, Sean. Thanks everybody. So a question came across the wire while Sean was speaking about whether or not we have a hashtag that we could post regarding this particular webinar so that we can continue the conversation afterwards. The answer is yes, there is one, but I neglected to put it on this slide deck. So I'm hoping one of our other presenters can go dig up that email for me. We'll go ahead and announce what that hashtag is so that we can pick up the conversation afterwards, but that's a great question. Moving right along, I will be short and sweet. My name's Ralph Barsi. I am at Achievers here in San Francisco. We offer an employee recognition platform to the enterprise and the reason we exist is to help organizations bolster employee recognition, alignment with corporate initiatives or value statements, and then finally to bolster employee engagement across the board.
(37:22):
Too many people who have jobs today are looking to leave and that's not a good thing. So we exist to help mitigate that statistic and keep everybody happy where they're at and make sure that employers are celebrating their employees and not tolerating them. So I encourage you to check us out and let's move into a favorite app of mine that I just learned about. I don't think it's new, but it's new to me. I heard about Charlie from my friend John Barrows. He was talking about the importance of accurate and relevant and current sales intelligence and sales insights. As most of you know, there's a number of offerings out there that help arm sales development reps with real time info that they're going to need before they penetrate a prospective account or engage a decision maker or an influencer in the organization. And Charlie is just one of those apps.
(38:18):
I am using the free app and what it does is it sends an email to you based on who you are meeting with in a given day. So if I'm going to meet with Sean or David or Andrew, Charlie will recognize their names on my calendar and Charlie will send me an email an hour before my scheduled meeting time and it will have aggregated all these insights and all of this intelligence on the people I'm about to meet with. So there may have been a tweet that Sean sent out maybe two hours prior to our meeting. Charlie's going to pick that tweet up. It's going to aggregate it. It's going to consolidate it into this nice little package here and send me an email so that when I do see Sean, I've got something very current and very relevant to say. And yeah, it could sound kind of cheesy, but think about it from the big picture.
(39:14):
In my experience, I have seen way too many sales development reps and salespeople for that matter get on the phone with a prospect or meet them face to face and just spill all over them information about their product, their offering, their service, themselves, their company, the company's history, and barely, if ever, do they get to the prospect's world. And apps that exist out there like Charlie, like InsideView, like DiscoverOrg, ZoomInfo, all the ones that are out there pushing intelligence to the sales reps have to be used optimally. And when you're using a sales intelligence app optimally, you are keeping the conversation about the prospect and not about yourself. It also is a good challenge for sales teams. A 20 minute call, try not to really talk about your offering at all. In fact, those initial calls should only be about the prospects so that you can learn and comprehend what pain, if any, that person might be in.
(40:20):
And it's apps like this that are going to really help build your credibility and rapport in those first initial calls. All right. Moving right along, unless any of you on the call have questions about Charlie, have you guys used it? Have you heard of it?
David Dulany (40:38):
I had never heard of it before, but I mean, philosophically, everything you're saying about making the call initially focused on the pain points of the prospect, I completely agree with. And anything that can help with that is worth its weight in gold.
Andrew McGuire (40:56):
Yeah. And it's Andrew. I've just started using it as well. I heard about it from John Barrows also recently. So I haven't started using it as much as you have, Ralph, but I signed up for it about a week ago. So we'll see how it goes.
Ralph Barsi (41:12):
Cool. Again, free to use, so I encourage you all to check it out. Moving into our final, and of course I'm a little bit partial because it's one that I selected, but this is one of my favorite free Chrome extensions out there. It's called Momentum, and it's a little moment of Zen every single day. And how it happens is when you click in Chrome from one tab to the next, if you create a new tab, for example, you're going to get this landscape image come up on your desktop and you're going to have your to-do list beneath the time block there that says 8:32. It says good morning to you or good afternoon, whatever time of day it is. And then beneath that it says, "What is your main focus for the day?" And you type in what your main focus for the day is, and you're on your way.
(42:06):
You're on your way browsing the web, you're doing your thing, and this too is very underrated in that I think one of the biggest barriers for salespeople to hitting their goals, hitting their quota is lack of focus. There's way too much information coming across the wire today. There's too many distractions and it is very easy to lose focus on what your target is for the day, whether that be X number of calls, whether that be engaging one of your top five most pristine, prospective logos out there that you're trying to win, whatever it is your goal is for that day, this is going to help bring you to the center. Just by opening up a new tab in Google Chrome, it's going to do wonders for your world if you take it seriously. You'll also see every time you open up the tab at the very bottom of what you're focused on for the day, you're going to see a really cool, powerful quote.
(43:04):
I can't tell you the number of times I have copied and pasted those quotes into Twitter or into LinkedIn just to share it with my network and the amount of response I get back and the engagement I get back because I'm bringing things to the center, I'm taking a deep breath, I'm conscious of my breath, et cetera, and I'm very present and a lot of people resonate with that because we're all looking for it. So if there's any little tool that's going to bring you to focus and to calm you down and to get you squared away so that you can focus on the mission at hand, I highly recommend Momentum. So check it out. It's available on the Google Chrome Web Store, very simple to download. You're up and running in no time, and I really hope you take advantage of it if you're not already.
(43:49):
Are you guys calm now?
David Dulany (43:52):
I feel way better. And Ralph, I was just going to say, I've walked past people's desks here at Infer and in my past lives and I've seen that app up and in the back of my mind I was kind of like, "That is very cool. I wonder what that is," but I hadn't reached out to ask them what it was, so I appreciate it. And one other quick note that made me think of it is one of my favorite bloggers is a guy named Darren Hardy, and he's the publisher of Success Magazine, and he's just a very prolific writer. He's great if you've never seen any of his stuff. And one of the things that he wrote about recently was the number one impediment to success and moving forward and staying on track is the incredible amount of distractions that are happening right now that we all have to deal with.
(44:51):
I mean, it just explodes more and more every day and just a little tool like that I think is super helpful because it's right there, right in front of you. So appreciate you bringing that up.
Ralph Barsi (45:05):
It's my pleasure. So that wraps things up for today. The one pressing question that I've gotten throughout this webinar is when's the next one? So as I mentioned at the start of this call, we did this in January, we unveiled 10 of the best sales development tools you should be using in 2015. We couldn't just leave it at that. We've got a whole year ahead when you start out in January. So here we are midyear with another nine to 10 more to recommend to you and your teams and we'll likely circle back at the very end of the year to do a wrap up and a recap and unveil a few more tools that we've been benefiting from or hearing about as sales development teams continue to build their technology stack. So if there was something that was not on here that you think the world needs to know about, let one of the four of us know and I guarantee you will get your message out into the ether and we'll make sure that the right people know about it.
(46:07):
Again, these are our email addresses. You're welcome to email us at any time with any question and we'll get you to the right person. We all have pretty robust networks and we're happy to connect you with people if you need any assistance with anything. Gentlemen, anything you want to say as we're wrapping up?
Andrew McGuire (46:28):
The only thing I want to say is I installed Momentum and the quote of the day is, "I am strong because I've been weak. I am fearless because I've been afraid. I am wise because I've been foolish."
Ralph Barsi (46:40):
Okay. I'm going to knock out 25 pushups right now. You got me all fired up. All right. I want to thank Andrew from Zendesk. I want to thank David from Infer. I want to thank Sean from the Mighty SalesLoft. I'm Ralph Barsi with Achievers and a huge shout out to our friends at BrightTalk for letting us get on the microphone and share some of our insights with all of you and thank you all for being generous with your time. We had a lot of attendees today and we can't thank you enough for taking time out of your day to be with us. So everybody go kick butt and we'll talk to you on the next webinar.
Sean Kester (47:16):
All right. Thanks everyone.
Ralph Barsi (47:18):
Thanks. Okay guys, cheers.