4 Essential Strategies to Generating Pipeline
Reading Time: 9 minutes
Guest: Tom Jenkins– Tom designs and implements sales and marketing strategies for growing and socially focused organizations. At present, he’s happily leading the Marketing Team at CloudTask.
Overview: In this episode of digital conversations our host Billy Bateman and our guest, Tom Jenkins of CloudTask shares 4 essential strategies to generating pipeline using bots and using social to create meaningful relationships with customers.
Reference:
Billy All right, everybody, welcome to the show today. Today, I’m glad to have Tom Jenkins, director of marketing and Cloud Chats, joining us in cloud chats. I would let Tom dive into a little bit more, but they outsource your chat, your PDR teams, so that you can just connect with people as soon as possible and don’t have to worry about managing that on your own. Tom, welcome to the show.
Tom Thank you. Thank you. Very happy to be here. Looking forward to it.
Billy Yeah. Glad to have you today. So before we before we hop into talking about a few things. Tell us a little bit about yourself then and how you got to where you are today.
Tom Yeah, yeah, sure thing. So, I’m Director of Marketing at Cloud Task. Cloud Task provides teams of outsourced chat experts. So the people behind your chats essentially making sure we engage with all your Web visitors or maybe social visit, anybody reaching out to you through live chat. We’re there to Provide experts backup by the technology, data analysis to make sure we’re optimizing everything in and smashing your target’s web chat.
Billy Awesome.
Tom So, we do outbound sales, inbound sales, customer support as well, but chat is a key focus of ours. It’s something we love and I manage their marketing team. So chat for sales and marketing lead, generation chat often falls under the marketing and so they are high level overview of what’s going on in our chat space, how we can keep making it better.
Billy Awesome man. Good to hear. Tom, with how did Cloud Task get started. Tell us a little bit about that.
Tom Yeah. So the two founders are well, one grew up in New York, the outman in Wisconsin, Israeli heritage. A wanted they saw outsourcing is a great model, but they were not excited by the quality of their sites. And they wanted to provide a real quality outsource service that comes with full management type scouter hiring, training and all of that.
If the tech behind make sure people are already having experts succeed and then the net does, Colombia had a big opportunity in this. Well, that’s on the same timezone as New York for half the year. Time for the other half of the year. A lot of native English Harlem Colombians have grown up in the states moving home expats like myself.
I’m a British now living in Colombia for most of the year. And they showed that I was a real good talent pool that mixed with great services, great innovation, security, high speed internet, really everything you needed to set up real quality. Quality outsourcing center in, you know, at the same time where we’d never really sell ourselves on costs.
But, you know, you are going to be undoubtedly deeper than a San Francisco or say, Boston salary, for example, so it kind of had the perfect mix of a quality and cost effectiveness. This was about four years ago and it’s just grow, you know, where we’re looking at percent growth this year. So a lot of excited times.
Billy Awesome man. So I know one of the things with without sourcing everybody always worries about is the quality of service you’re going to get. Because these people, they’re not in your office every day. They’re not. So to say drinking the Kool-Aid and all in on just your company. How do you guys overcome that to really provide private pride experts that understand the business and the products for your clients?
Tom Yeah. So, training and onboarding is absolutely essential there. And then ongoing coaching day to day from mass. We wanted to add a lot of accounts and we’ve been doing this a long time, four years in now. And, you know, if we’d be honest, like any business when we first thought it out, naturally, we made a couple of mistakes.
Looking at the start training process. Constantly tweaking it and improving it. We have trainers with that have trained hundreds, thousands of people in sales, customer support well and also we are also looking to work as much with the clients as possible. So that we are external to your office, we like to see ourselves as an extension of your team.
Not outsource team. And so we left into work with your trainers, with your materials. If you don’t have a training program, we help build it with you. If you do have it, we’re looking to type your program. And you know, if we spot any areas of opportunity and our expertise to bear, that comes as no one.
And the second is in the on boarding stage, you know, right from initial sales rep contacts to when our customer success managers take either, they’re just looking to regular meetings, get a KPI is right I get the quality checks in place. Basically have all the reporting we need to really hit your goals and grow the account.
Billy Awesome, man. So, when your on boarding people for each of your customers know, let’s talk about chat just a little bit, because that’s really kind of what the world that we optimize is this chat bots and then live chat with sales reps. So we wind up, you know, we view the chat bot as.
Hey, it’s a great tool to connect people to people and do a little bit of qualifying and just sift through people a little bit. So your sales reps are effectively using time when you guys are training people for chat. How do you approach that?
Tom Yes. There’s a couple of things we focus on. It’s the Cain scale is this. It’s Chat isn’t rocket science. And sometimes I think people you know, when you look at it, even I thought chat, just forgot the basics and it’s just going through with people, active readings, clearly a big while, making sure you take a step back, giving people smiles to make examples of what they need to be, how they need to be looking at things and responding.
Response of a big one. You know, even if you don’t know the answer, straight out, making sure that you would need knowledge. I’ve seen a chat come in. Hey, thanks for writing to me. I’m just finding that the best answer to your question. Or whatever that may be. And mirroring tone as well. So some people just won’t answer the straight direct.
They won’t even go in with. Hi, how are you? I just be like, what’s your price? Yeah, you need to be polite. And making sure you let people know that. Just give people the answers. If somebody is more. Hi, how are you? How’s the weather there? How to engage with them on that level and then it sends a very short, sharp point, I think, off the top of my head.
Billy No. I think those are those are great things. I mean, we’ve seen similar similar trends, especially with a guy that even if you don’t know the answer, you just to acknowledge them and let them know you’re working on it as soon as you can. Otherwise, they’re just going to drop off that chat and move on to the competitor’s Web site, see if they can get an answer.
So with tone? That’s that’s an interesting point. With tone that. There you just match it. If you, if they just say, hey, what’s the price? Skip the pleasantries and just give him the price. And you guys have seen a lot of success with that, it sounds like.
Tom Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, we have the best we’ve got, we manage the chat, IPswitch, network security. Based if Boston. It go I think six reps working on their account. And then the first day it’s the. Something we’ve got eight million in revenue now and that’s led. No. Eight million in revenue. Eight million in pipeline. Sorry. Let’s two point to five million in new revenue side. Yeah. This is how people are being trained and it’s working to some level.
Billy Yeah. No Jet. We we see similar results for our customers who usually are managing the chat part of it on their own with their own teams. But it’s a great way to generate pipeline and ultimately revenue. All right, man. So as were what? What else are you guys? Where are you seeing success for your for your customers outside of chat?
Tom Yeah. So some shows, clearly a big one now on Linked-In. That’s just, you know, I’m a bit garibay for you, I’m sure other people listening in on organic reach there you can get through Linked-In is crazy when you’re just building your personal brand and brand presence.
And I think when again, when you learn to do Linked-In right, then, you know, not just say it’s not a site, you call it social selling is not a sales tool, it’s an engagement. And then that was building tool. One of our trainers said that, is a way to start with me. Just think of Linked-In signing it.
Do you think the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with your friends? Yeah. Bit more professional, of course. But, you know, you’re just being nice. Building relationships, educating, kind of having fun, adding value. Just forget about the sales side. Once you’ve got a relationship then you can, then. That relates that conversation.
Yeah, the initial relationship buildings K and you know, let’s not forget the phones, the phones. They are king of sales. So, yeah, let’s not forget the phone. The phone is still king of sales, so to speak. It’s where we generate most of our results. We love chat, chat is brilliant.
I always try to use them all in combination. So using Linked-In. In combination with chat. In combination with the phone. In combination with email. And if you got the cadences right, we’ll touch points for each. Every channel is just going to snowball and benefit the other one.
Billy Yeah, I agree together having the omni channel approach these days. So I want to double click on social for a minute. So what would you guys doing for your customers on social? Are you simply building out networks or working on engagement on different platforms?
Tom So we typically don’t do the marketing and brand awareness. We do that to help build relationships. When I’m on providing teams that ask the SDR’s and BDR’s and set the using that profiles to expand their brand presence, reach out to new clients, reach out to new prospect, share valuable information and try and initiate those first level conversations that helps out qualified appointments for our clients.
Billy Ok, that all good stuff. So are you. When you have this omni channel approach to you, when you set up teams for your customers. If you have a customer that they’re having, you know, people on the phones and people on chat. Do you have to dedicate? Do you separate those responsibilities between some reps are simply chat? Some are outbound, outbound on the flow and inbound on the phone. How are you guys divvying up the responsibility?
Tom It really depends on the size of the client and the scope of the work. So when you have somebody with the Web traffic of Ipswich, for example, we just do that chat. We don’t do that outbound calling, for example, or huge Web site. We have five people, six. percent dedicated to that.
With other accounts, there’s no huge Web traffic. You know, there’s only a few chats and they may be about starting the conversation, just doing initial awareness and qualification and then a rep stepping in. So in that case, sometimes we would have reps slipping or different channels together. Just the key with that.
And the big thing to watch out for is the worst thing that can happen in a chat. No one respond thing. And when you’re multi-tasking that,that’s a challenge that you always have to be aware where all of them make sure that if you do have somebody working on multiple channels, there is some form of backup or system that somebody else can step in if they’re not immediately available.
Billy Yeah. Great issue. If you’re not going to have dedicated, you gather, have some fail safe, therefore, because you never know when everybody’s gonna be on the phone and then all the sudden they’re couple chats come in. So yeah. Okay Man, well, I’ve liked all these insights. I think they’re all really good.
If you had if somebody was setting up chat on their own team for the first time and and getting, you know, people on board. What advice would you have for that person if you’re like, OK, you want to get this started? You want to get it, get it going really well. What’s what’s your advice for them?
Tom First piece of advice I’ll probably give you two, just go for it and get it knowing it. So all I’ve got to get this perfect. So, you know, where do I begin? Really just begin, though, with a couple of Yoki Plate pages, your most How I Web traffic or Ho I host in pages. Per chat on there.
Come out with your best messaging. How it works. Test that out. Constantly learn them to analyze the results. What worked? What didn’t? Keep tweaking and keep optimizing? So you begin. It’s gonna be impossible to get it perfect. Just go up again. Go for it. Optimize and take it from there.
Billy Couldn’t it couldn’t agree more. You just gotta get going. We see so many people that just like by drifter intercom in their there. We’ve got to get it implemented. But it’s gotta be perfect. And it’s you can’t get too perfect in a vacuum. So you just gotta give them a good enough plan to get started and you’ll learn and optimize from there. So I couldn’t agree more time. Well, thanks. Thanks for the time. If people want to get a hold of you and learn more about Cloud Task, where can they go?
Tom Yeah. go to “cloudtaskcom”. Engage with our drift and see what we’re on about is probably the best way. Myself personally I’m always on Linked-In. Tom Jenkins, Cloud Task. I should come up and there free to say hello.
Billy Ok, Tom. Thank you, man. And an until later. We’ll talk again.
Tom Yeah. Awesome, thanks so much. Love being on,.
Billy Chat later, man.