Connection is the new currency to fuel revenue growth in 2H 2022 – with Phil Burch

Phil Burch

Speaker

Phil Burch has 15 years of experience in the B2B market, and his transition from Customer Success Manager to Product Marketing Manager has given him unique insights into upselling, cross selling, product launches, and strategic messaging. He is currently the Director of Product Marketing at Sendoso, the leading Sending Platform that helps drive revenue with personalized gifts, branded swag, eGifts, and more. Phil completed his Undergraduate Degree from University of California, Davis, and a Master of Business Administration from the University of San Fransisco. Phil continues to be a leader and innovator, and is forging a new connection between physical and digital marketing!

Quotes

“Now is the time to think about ‘how do we get that humanity back into our customer journeys in order to build human connections at scale.’ That’s how we’re going to differentiate, and that’s how we’re going to drive meaningful business results for our organizations.” 

Key Points

  • Consumers tune out most digital communication because the high volume has turned into noise.  
  • We need to focus on better communication, not more communication.  
  • Buyers are people who buy from brands that understand them.  
  • You can drive sales by creating memorable experiences for key decision makers. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to our webinar today. Connection is the new currency to fuel revenue growth in 2023. Now, before we get all the way into our topic today, I want everyone to think about these three numbers, because these have major implications for demand marketers within B2B, across all segments. $300 Trillion, four percent, and 0.5 percent. Now, we’ll get back to those in just a second.

Today, we’re going to talk about a few different items. Number one, are we as demand generation professionals too focused on metrics? Why connection with our buyers is king? How to deliver a more human marketing experience? And how industrial customers are doing this today. Now, a little bit about your speaker today. My name is Phil Burch. I’m a director of product marketing here at Sendoso.

So I am coming to you live from Mill Valley, California, which is just north of the Golden Gate Bridge here in Marin County in California. My wife and I do quite a bit of hiking because that’s what you do in Marin. And I’m also a violently mediocre golfer, which means try as I might, I continue to play, but don’t necessarily play well.

Now, that is enough about me. Let’s talk about what those numbers mean that we just showed a few moments ago. 300 trillion represents the number of emails that will be sent in 2022. 4% is the industry standard email conversion rate, and 0.5% is the standard click through rate for display ads. Now, these three numbers have some pretty significant implications for demand gen professionals, again, across all segments.

Number one, your buyers are being inundated with digital noise and digital communications, right? Because so many emails are being sent. Because we continue to increase investment in display advertising and email marketing. Your buyers have tuned out these digital approaches, because there are just so many of them. The other thing that this really, the implications of this are really significant is that performance improvement becomes a slog. Right?

If you have so many digital communications out there and hitting the same people over and over again and they’ve tuned out, it’s really difficult to actually improve your performance in that environment. Right? And so invariably, the emphasis becomes about more campaigns, more webinars, more virtual events, etc., rather than better, right? Because performance is difficult. And ultimately it really comes down to ‘how can we get more things out there to push up leads that much more.’ Right?

And so the implications of those numbers are really significant when you think about it in totality. In the environment that we’re currently in. Right now, in my opinion, and based off of the industry benchmarks that we’re seeing, I think gamifying metrics is simply gone too far. Right. I think go to market teams, and marketing teams in particular have become obsessed with gaming metrics.

Things like click through rate, lead to opportunity rate, opens rate, engagement rates just to name a few. Win rates, competitive win rates. But I think as marketers, we’ve forgotten that our core purpose is to actually connect with our buyers and compel them to act – right? In this context, action means download this e-book, take a demo, read a reader e-book trial our product or even buy, right?

Simply just thinking about it in terms of getting them to click, I think misses the point. It helps describe why we have 300 trillion emails being sent just in this year alone. And so I think ultimately we need to reframe the question – not about ‘how to get more’, but how do we actually connect with our buyers at scale.

Right. I think that go to market professionals on the whole have has really outsourced this communication piece through digital strategies, through marketing automation tools, through social advertising. And I think there’s a really good reason for this, right? It is really a lot simpler to simply acquire an email address than to try to build a connection with the buyer.

And I think that the really agents or overreliance on digital strategies became even more pronounced during the pandemic because human connection disappeared overnight. Right. And so I think when we are overly reliant on digital communications, 4%, 0.5% and 300 trillion suddenly become make a lot more sense in context. And so to me, I think we have all picked up some bad habits.

How many of you have been in a marketing strategy meeting where the sole focus was about metrics and dashboards, but not about message, story, and value? Right. And I think this is where we start to see some of those really poor engagement rates. Why buyers are tuning out, because ultimately human connection is a basic human need and our buyers are human and we need to remember that

I think it is. Again, it’s easier to rely solely on digital engagement to execute. Right. But I think what we really need to do is take a step back and really think about how we’re differentiating, building that connection, and ultimately that is what’s going to drive meaningful business results and differentiation. Right. And by extension, this means this connecting piece will compel our buyers to act in the way that we want them to.

But don’t just take it from me. Even our friends at Gartner now recognize that buyers buy from brands, that they care about them. Right. This quote is really telling 79% of businesses only buy from brands that actively demonstrate ‘they understand and care about me’. So we have to ask ourselves, are our customer journeys demonstrating that we care about our buyers throughout every touchpoint that we have with them – from lead to renewal, And by extension, can digital only strategies do enough to demonstrate that we care about them and get them to act the way that we want to?

In my perspective, from my point of view, based off our industry benchmarks that we talked about earlier, the fact that 35% of email outreach is simply ignored, I can confidently say that we aren’t doing quite enough here. Right? We need to recognize our buyers again are human and not just another entry in our email database or marketing database.

Right. And so I think now is the time to think about how do we get that humanity back into our customer journeys in order to build human connections at scale. Right? And that’s how we’re going to differentiate and that’s how we’re going to drive meaningful business results for our organizations. And so to me, the way we think about this at Sendoso, so is the human marketing experience, right? And I think demand generation marketers in general need new approaches and different tools in their toolbox to stand out amidst the sea of 300 trillion emails that inundate our buyers today. Right? And so with at Sendoso, the way that we think about it is this idea of a human working experience. Right. And our customers today are leveraging some so across these five strategic initiatives to really help revenue teams put the humanity back into their customer journeys across these five different elements.

Accelerating revenue, building brand affinity, capturing customer retention, driving pipeline, and expanding relationships. Today, I’m going to walk you through two of our customer examples, specifically around accelerating revenue and driving pipeline to help illustrate how Sendoso customers are trying to and successfully putting the humanity back into their marketing experiences and customer journeys. So first, we’re going to talk about our friends at Gong.

For those of you that are not familiar, they ultimately enable revenue leaders to adapt strategies using real time insights from sales conversations. Laura, their senior manager for account based marketing, needed to help Gong move upmarket to the enterprise. But, they struggled between poor alignment between sales and marketing, in particular, the SDR team getting on board with executing marketing campaigns.

I wonder if anyone in the room virtually here has ever had that problem before. The other really important point was she needed to create a memorable experience for these key decision makers at their target accounts. And so she went out to find a solution like Sendoso. Right? And what really moved the needle for Gong was our deep integration with some of their core to go to market apps like Salesforce and Outreach.

And really again, getting back to that memorable unboxing experience to really break through with these core decision makers. Right? And so, they ultimately leveraged Sendoso direct to actually ship pinatas to these core buyers at enterprise organizations. Right? And so she partnered directly with her SDR team and an SDR actually came up with the idea that a customer conversation is similar to the pinata.

The real value is what’s inside, right? And so she was able to get really good buy in and alignment from her SDR partners because it was really personalized, it was memorable, and really spoke to the value of the solution. Right. So they matched the message to the gifting strategy and this ultimately had a massive, massive impact for Gong, right?

So they were able to leverage intent data through demand base, the leverage outreach integration to make sure their stores are able to leverage the gifts and the sequences directly from where they live, right in outreach. And ultimately, the results were were really, really impressive. They drove 50% increases in meeting attendance, which meant they were able to get more leads down the funnel, more quickly, and ready to buy or at least talk to sell sales in more advanced conversations.

And the conversion rate improved to over 14%, which sourced five and a half million in pipeline and influenced another $33 million in pipeline just from this one campaign. Right. And and so what Gong was able to do since is actually rerun this similar gifting strategy and campaign across multiple times of the year, incorporate those learnings, and continue to drive higher and higher impact, as a result of quickly iterating on what they’ve learned.

And so I think what this helps highlight is a couple of things. Number one, how a human marketing experience really builds that equity and start to help build that relationship with your buyers. And one of the other really important outputs of this is that really deeper connection and alignment across your go to market teams to truly win as a team when you’re able to leverage integrations directly, partner with, with these types of initiatives and ultimately drive a lot of success for everyone across the revenue team.

So our next example are from our friends at Verkada. Verkada provides commercial buildings with intuitive video security, access controls, environmental sensors, visitor management, these types of things. And what their key problem was, is that they had a lot of success leveraging Sendoso in the US and gifting in particular. But they also recognized they had a really good opportunity to drive engagement with their prospects across the globe.

And amplify the investments they made into their webinar campaigns. With Verkada webinars are really critical piece of their customer journey, and so they needed to make sure that their partner could deeply integrate to their marketing automation platform Marketo, and have that global logistics layer to ensure that they could really connect with buyers around the world, across the UK, Australia and obviously North America.

And so what they did was they leveraged Sendoso in gifting to incentivize their webinar attendance and built a campaign to connect their marketing message, which is solutions are that are built to last, alongside their gifting strategy by sending prospects Maglight flashlights. Right. And so this allowed and enabled that team to apply B2C marketing mindsets into a B2B campaign.

By leveraging these different strategies across the customer journey, incentivizing webinar attendance, following up with the Maglight flights and then ultimately continuing that down the path of their customer journey, they were able to drive 72% increases in webinar attendance. Three x Response rates, three x the response rates to their outreach, which drove four x ROI with this campaign.

00:15:33:18 – 00:16:28:01
And so again, the other benefit is sense is deeply integrated within their demand gen processes as they exist now, they can actually focus on executing more webinars rather than doing things like chasing down one off gifts or those types of of non revenue contributions and really focus on what matters. And ultimately, Sendoso is able to do this because we connect the three legs of the stool, as we like to think about it. Technology, logistics and expertize. Really that technology layer is that end to end seamless management of all things sending, and that is everything from sourcing to identifying who needs to get actually sent the item or items and then ultimately being able

00:16:28:01 – 00:16:56:05
to report back on ROI and ensuring budget management, so the right people and the right teams have have access to the appropriate gifts and audit trail for finance and those types of things. Global logistics layers, which means that we own all of our sending fulfillment centers across the globe, which means that you have total control over things like personalization and unboxing experiences as well.

00:16:56:05 – 00:17:21:15
And we even ensure that carbon offsets are also included within that type of of logistics control that we offer. And our expertize. Ultimately, Sendoso really built this market in this segment and category. And so you were able to leverage our experts as extensions of your team to make sure that you can deliver the appropriate gift at the at the right stage of the funnel.

00:17:22:17 – 00:17:52:14
And also, if you do need to partner with us on things like other professional service offerings, or additional training, we’re able to facilitate that and really make sure that our experts are dug in alongside those of you that are really in the execution of a lot of these different types of initiatives as well. Right? And that can mean whether you are in demand generation or all the way through customer success as well.

And really what I hope that this presentation and what these examples help to show, is that sending amplifies your marketing investments across the customer journey, right? Whether you are trying to drive more interest to your events or webinars or demos, ensuring you’re staying top of mind through other initiatives we can offer, other services we can offer, like virtual experiences, really getting through into the contracting by staying top of mind and then all the way through onboarding and retention, right?

And celebrating those customer milestones and ensuring that we really put that humanity back into our marketing investments throughout these customer journeys. So, in terms of our call to action today, I want each of you, you know, the day after the conference here is I want you to think about one campaign and ask yourself these three questions. Number one, how does this touch point help us build a connection with our buyers?

And if you are believing that it is, think about how it’s doing that and really define that more concretely. Think about is this campaign adding value to our customer journey? If so, how? And would we benefit from adding more personalization this campaign? And what types of tactics and strategies can we take to add more personalization to it? So, so with that, I would like to thank you for joining this session today and listening to the webinar today.

Also, I hope you have a great rest of your conference and thank you so much for joining us once again.