(888) 815-0802Revolutionizing Sales: The Impact of Behavior Change, with Brandee Sanders [Episode 1152]
In our latest podcast episode, Alastair Woolcock and Revenue.io CMO Brandee Sanders analyze Gartner’s insights on driving sales behavior change. Their discussion dives into the pivotal role of marketing across the entire sales spectrum, as well as the importance of embracing behavioral changes in sales and marketing teams. They spotlight the importance of aligning internal experiences with customer engagement – integrating a customer-centric approach – and adopting data-driven strategies to navigate the ever-evolving sales landscape with finesse and adaptability.
Podcast Transcript:
SSE 1152 Brandee & Alastair transcript
0:08-0:22
Speaker
Welcome back everybody to this week’s sales strategy and enablement podcast. I’m Alastair Woolcock, Chief Strategy & Revenue Officer here at Revenue.io. And I am thrilled to have with me today our Chief Marketing Officer, Brandee Sanders.
0:22-0:54
Speaker
Now, Brandee comes from an amazing background, has recently joined our company to help take us to the next level and drive the forward-looking growth here for us. She’s come from companies like Sony in the previous days, has been around talking major conferences around marketing strategy around the world, has been around the contact center space with Observe.AI, a bunch of awesome places, a wealth of experience. Brandee, so happy to have you on with us today.
0:55-1:10
Speaker
Well, first off, I feel like I need you as my hype man because I feel like if I play that every day when I wake up in the morning, everything feels so accomplished and wonderful, but a pleasure to be here. Very excited to be on the podcast today.
1:11-1:50
Now, Brandee, you and I and a few of the team the other day were looking at some of Delaney Kirkwood’s latest research from Gartner. Now, for our audience, as you know, full disclosure, I’ve also former Gartner alumni myself, so we accuse any biases there. But Delaney did a wonderful session and some groundbreaking new research there on how to drive sales behavior and change. And Brandee, I’d love to dive into your perspectives from you as a chief marketing officer in a world where marketing isn’t just top of the funnel, but it’s all funnel these days.
1:51-2:17
Speaker
Behavior change is both for sales reps, as it is as much for customers. Let’s talk a little about what Delaney is saying from Gardner. And also, we are a company that lives in this world of behavior change and have for the past decade. What are we seeing? What’s going on on that side? So first word is yours, Brandee. What did you think of Delaney’s comments? Well. She’s going into this.
2:18-3:01
Speaker
I think it’s really interesting because the timing could not be more appropriate. I feel like we most recently with, we can even go back to one of the former podcast episodes where we talked about spray and praise dead and quality over quantity and just that it’s, it’s, you know, not so much just people selling to sell anymore. It’s like, you know, sellers are helpers. They’re meant to be there to not only sell better, but to give a better experience to customers or to prospects or, or even within the organization themselves. So the timing on this is really interesting because I think as everyone’s going into this next fiscal, they’re obviously aware of all the challenges that are in the market and selling has become more important than ever.
3:02-3:30
Speaker
And it’s more than just, hey, speed to lead, which is wonderful. It’s the behaviors of the reps. And that’s not even just the behaviors of the reps. It’s the behavior of that organization as a whole, whether that’s compliance, it’s coaching, it’s enablement revenue operations. And then of course, our wheelhouse underneath marketing demand gen. It’s really about how do we improve that and move the needle to quote ourselves here even a little bit every day and a more positive direction through those behavioral changes.
3:31-4:18
Speaker
I think you’re bang on and I will just, but I wanna throw a statement at you and see how much you agree or disagree with this. And as the audience goes, I really want our audience to think about this. Tiffany Bova, who is now a Salesforce evangelist, former Garner lead analyst for Go To Market Device Worldwide and now publisher of several books, he’s really gone down this path and I tend to agree with her. Have we over accessed? Have we overdone the approach on customer experience and forgotten about the seller experience, the marketing experience, the internal experience? Look, I love being customer centric.
4:19-5:17
Speaker
I love being customer driven, but how are we actually going to change behavior when an average seller now uses 7.4 tools, marketers use close to 12 to 14. Like the technology is becoming more prolific. Gen AI is making that even more profound. Sellers are selling less than ever before. They’re getting less face time than ever before. It’s a 19% in total with customer facing time. And I just feel like we’re at this tipping point where it’s actually we’re seeing this, we see a resurgence of actually the right mix of motivation, abilities and triggers that are data driven to support the seller, to actually make the seller better, like the seller experience better, make the internal experience as prolifically awesome as the customer experience.
5:18-5:50
Speaker
And I would have packaged this all up in a single bow to say this. Would you go buy something from a company today, Brandee, that took you seven different tools to buy that product? Like as a consumer, would you? As a B2B buyer, would you? Like even in B2B sales, you’re buying another piece of technology and as the buyer, you would use 70 pieces of technology. Would you buy it? I know I wouldn’t. So why when Delaney’s doing this?
5:51-6:27
Speaker
Talking about this idea of behavior change and internal change, isn’t this really going to be about actually getting back to fundamentals of the internal experience and the motivation the tools are providing for that experience? Oh, this is such a good point. I think if we just stand back and look at the wider aperture of selling as a whole, and the pandemic, by the way, so B2B sales and marketing as a rule, this landscape has seen more disruption, I think, in the past five years than it did in nearly a century.
6:28-7:02
Speaker
If you think about it like the pandemic brought these unprecedented challenges for customer engagement, we’ve seen things like Amazon and all of these large companies kind of shift the expectation of like immediacy and personalization and the digital experience, the level of engagement you see from reps. If you go back and you look at this, all those rapid technological advances, like even AI in the past 12 to 18 months, has permanently shifted how sellers sell and how buyers buy, whether that’s B2B buyers interacting with vendors and complex sales cycles or even B2C and B2C.
7:03-7:43
Speaker
So I think the answer, of course, would be no for me. If I had to go through 65 different loopholes, like no, just show me the product, what does it do? Can you explain it to me in 60 seconds? And if not, on to the next, because it’s far too competitive in this digital, in this literal digital landscape to not have that delivery be succinct and personalized and as optimized as possible based on what it is that you’re looking for. And more than ever, to your point, Alastair, we have a proliferation of data. Like you’re going into 55 different places, like, oh, there’s enrichment over here and there’s this over here. And it’s the unification of that.
7:44-8:15
Speaker
And then also the suggestive actions that drive it. Because you can have the best dashboards in the world. Does it matter if you’re an exhausted AE or an overburdened SDR rep or an underwater CS rep? If you’re not able to prioritize an action on that immediately. And I think that is the difference. Like when you think about cutting edge strategies and like tactically, going from strategy into tactical execution, the ability to execute quickly at scale on the most meaningful prioritizations is gonna be so important.
8:16-8:55
Speaker
And I think Delaney and then quite a few other folks as we look at like, you know, the end of your wrap ups that are happening around us, they’re all talking about it. And I think more than ever, not to use that phrase, but it is literally factually empirically, statistically true. More than ever, behavioral changes are gonna drive that for both the buyers and the sellers who are selling. Because it’s become complex on both ends of that spectrum. And that level of personalization, multi -digital channels, whether it’s SMS, chat, web, phone calls, and whether it’s a contact center model or individual reps scattered across the US in a remote large scale enterprise organization, we have to be able to serve.
8:56-9:40
Speaker
And I think that’s gonna be so key to unifying it and making sure that it’s in a place that’s easily accessible and can also be adopted by those reps. So if I can, I want to dive in a tad here on this, Randy, and maybe a couple examples, I think it’s a really important thread to pull. You know, when we really access and agree on the importance of the execution, I think, a lot of the tooling and a lot of the data out there right now is informative. It’s often a lagging indicator, not a forward-looking indicator. You and I both love data and goodness knows we have a lot of it and we can look at many different aspects of the go -to -marker motion at any given time.
9:41-10:18
Speaker
But as a CMO, how are you helping to simplify the data and give me like a couple examples of, when you say execution through to the sales rep, how is that being simplified? What would you say to your counterparts out there? What’s your advice on where do they start on simplifying the execution piece? Because I think you’re right. If you can make execution easier, of course it’s gonna have a variation to a result. So yeah, let’s dive in there for me if you could.
10:19-10:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think at a high level when, and it’s easy, and I feel like full disclosure, I have worked in sales before, so this isn’t just some posh marketing person giving a random opinion on, you’ve never held a quota, you don’t know what it’s like to pay your mortgage under the envelope or the guillotine of a commission. So full disclosure, I’ve been on the other side, don’t worry. I just came to the dark side over here because we have gifts. I think it’s about understanding focus, right? So it’s quite easy. If you look at the highest level OKRs or goals for a company, you have to be able to take whatever that revenue number it is that you’re meeting and go backwards.
10:58-11:50
Speaker
Quite often people start at the beginning and they’re like, what are we doing this week, in this month, and in this quarter without going to the end and reverse engineering that data? So as an example from the marketing, and I work with SDR teams as well, if we’re at the marketing, we know we have to make that $100 for the end of the year. And you go over and you look at quarterization and you look at seasonality and you look at your product roadmap and you’re looking at all of the different events and things that you know have to happen in that year for activations, you can start to break it down from this huge enormous number that’s terrifying and just sometimes overwhelming, especially at the rep level, into meaningful bits and pieces that then you can bring down into the month and bring down into the week and just say, hey, if you’re looking at that measurement of barometer and you have 100 to make for the year and you’re at 25% at the end of the first quarter, great, you’re on track.
11:51-12:30
Speaker
It’s being able to have visibility into what have we attained in the short term while aligning to the long term, which in theory, of course, is very easy to sit in the chair and say, but having a platform that is a part of your CRM and then also having a leader who understands how to take that complex thing and break it down so that it’s not like, hey, we’re going to have, I’m 50% growth, 100% growth, 200% growth year-to-year. You have to take the complex and simplify it. And I think a lot of that comes from the behavior of the leadership team and then being able to take that and reverse engineer it, break it down. So, hey, if we have this big goal, what does that look like?
12:31-12:59
Speaker
And then below that, for the marketing and sales part, we could say if we know in the first quarter of the year there are challenges with X or at the end of the year when there’s seasonality impacts and you’re going to have lower levers to pull because everyone’s out of office, November, December, you can plan better and then planning backs up into the action. So if you know you have to meet X during a certain quarter, you have to front load that quarter, right? You have to be able to build, you sandbag that and you’re looking ahead versus retrospectively, which is how you get to better execution.
13:00-13:32
Speaker
It shouldn’t just be it’s the end of the quarter and we all look back at the dashboard and go, gosh, we missed it, right? You should be able to say whether it’s in your native CRM or in a platform, whether or not, like what percentage of attainment do you have against the goal for that quarter, for that month or that week? And then move immediately against it, whether that means, hey, we’re low, we lost a whale deal. How do we make that back up again? Hey, marketing, we experienced churn. Okay, great, you’re going to go look at stage two and try to activate against those with an upsell motion to try to make back that dollar that you lost.
13:33-14:10
Speaker
Like it’s really about taking something big and bringing it down to a level where each and every rep and each and every marketing person and each and every owner, whether it’s CS or otherwise, does I have a stake in that revenue because revenue is everyone’s job, not just the sales rep. And that mentality I think is not something that always existed, like, you know, with marketing we’re mad men, like we make decks and pretty pitchers and that’s it. It’s not just a service center for the org, which of course it is, it’s a strategic partner. Because if you have to go do a rapid fire execution and chase a potential deal or something like that, you need to know that you can lean back into marketing and say, I have to go get this, what do we do?
14:11-14:57
Speaker
Tick tock the time’s running out. And so that execution comes from deeper alignment and of course building into your operations because without operations, you could do something good once or twice, but then never repeat it and not understand why it worked. And I think that’s super, super important. Yeah, and I think you’re hitting the heart of a RevOps function there in terms of that end -to -end integration between sales, marketing, and CS. I will, you know, what I really like that you said there when you think of the execution, I’m going to put your words in my language. You know, micro-execution and scaling down is really important, right? Because we often cast a big vision, but micro -execution doesn’t mean micro-management. Right? That is a real big difference there.
14:58-15:55
Speaker
And so, you know, the example that pops to my mind is I think of marketing and I think of enablement. A really important piece that we use, every company uses to help inform, train, and make their salespeople better and more adapt to what they do with the customer, right? With the idea of changing a behavior. Good. Nothing wrong with that. But like this podcast, anybody is listening to what you and I are saying today, or any other enablement session that happens, people forget approximately 75% of everything they learn every 30 days. So, which is why we do in school, why do we do testing, why do we do reinforcement? Because it’s the way in which we make knowledge stick. Now, traditionally that’s done via the, well, we got everybody together on a Friday, we took them through something and then next week we’re going to do something and then next week we’re going to do something.
15:56-17:00
Speaker
Sure, fair enough. But micro-enablement, micro -marketing is where there’s demonstrable gains and success, but it comes with a catch. You suddenly got a volume of tasks and things that people have to do, which goes directly in the, you know, is an antagonist to what I started with, which is you’re asking someone to do a lot more than just selling now. So clearly we can’t give them an increase in volume of tasks. So, as I think of a modern CMO and I think of modern CROs, and I think of people that go to market motion, like how are you automating the micro-learning? How are you automating the micro -enablement to reinforce in real time the behavior change you want to make? How do I be omnipresent to a seller, to a resource at their most critical times of engagement?
17:01-17:53
Speaker
That to me, that’s the future and it’s shifting towards and people need to get comfortable with the idea. There’s omnipresent technology now that is going to be there to assist people in every conversation, in every place they go. Because if I can get people back to more external-facing conversation due to having omnipresent technology that is always there to assist, now I can break down my marketing into micro. I can break my training into micro pieces because I’m not actually asking them to be the learner thing. I’m asking you to execute and I’ll give you the apparatus that automates and is ever present on that. This pretty new stuff though, Brandee, do you see that in practice and leave revenue .io out of this, right?
17:54-18:35
Speaker
But in terms of does that sound realistic to an enterprise in your experience? I think it has to be. I think that to operate at scale, and you could be servicing SMB, it could be mid -market, it could be enterprise, it really doesn’t matter even the size right now, it’s the volume and the velocity. Because of that level of digital engagement, and we’re thinking about, it could be SMS, it’s chat, it’s website, it’s calls, it’s emails, it’s LinkedIn, there’s all these different channels, the only way this scales without you burning and churning, is through workflows, automations, and better operations.
18:36-19:20
Speaker
Which is, you have to kind of measure twice and cut once I think it is, and not get too far over your skis so to speak. But if you know you have a goal, and there’s this again, kind of like overwhelming amount of data, whether it’s platform, it’s channels, whatever it is, you have to be able to bucket them in such a way that you don’t have to, as an example, tend the garden every day. You set up the water, you set and forget the ground when you’re putting everything in, and you put the seeds in, and you come back and you nurture as you need to go. And that could be as an example, email sequences, nurture cadences, pre -slated social, video assets that get reused and redistributed like 18, 20 times.
19:21-19:55
Speaker
Remember, because internally, we’re like, hey, I’ve seen that before, guess what? Your prospect hasn’t, they haven’t seen it yet. So it’s all fresh and new to them. So like taking one thing and making it live 10 times is how you scale that demand for what it is that go-to-market is doing. And whether it’s on the sales side, or the CS side, or the marketing side, you have to find a way to set some of those things up to do the work for you, so you’re not buried in the tactical. That could be through GPT, it could be through cadencing, it could be through some of the generative solutions that are out there in the market, depending upon the size of your org, the tech stack and the resources.
19:56-20:41
Speaker
But you should be thinking about that. Like when you’re building something, and regardless of Rev. Io or any of the other orgs, like universally, how much high touch does this need? Can we set it, build it, come back to it with maintenance, but not have to be on top of it every day? And that could be for upsell motions, it could be for nurtures. There’s so many different places that you can take a few moments to build something intelligent and have it live for you in perpetuity while you’re going out there and doing the more high level strategic things that you know as either a rep, a leader, a marketer, or a CS person require more high touch. So it’s about making the technology work for you, not the other way around. You shouldn’t feel like you’re buried under the technology because it’s there to work for you and augment what you’re doing.
20:42-21:25
Speaker
I think you’re so right because when you think of a particular multi -channel engagement is so key these days, but it’s not across one person. You’ll see an average sales rep in an enterprise deal today and B2B sales. There’s going to be between nine and 14 people. I believe the last time I looked at behavior change data from Gartner, nine to 14 people involved in that transaction. At best you’re going to have champions to two to three, right? So the simple maths are against the wrap out of the box and they need to engage not just via email. We know five or more channels as key, you know, LinkedIn, texting, calling, emailing, LinkedIn, like all of these things need to be used.
21:26-22:08
Speaker
So it’s like this is this compounding effect where that’s a lot of connectivity to get to a deal done and people just don’t do it. So how do we make this seller experience better? We automate. That’s where sequencing technologies come in, but it’s sequencing not for top of the funnel, which brand I think is what you’re telling everybody is marketing is on top of the funnel. Marketing is now full funnel. It’s all the way through to renewal. Like we’re there the whole time. Like yeah, that influence has been through. And coordination of asset and task, buyer task. So what’s a buyer need to complete at each one of your funnel stages? That’s the right question that we should be asking. What’s the task that needs to be completed?
22:09-23:07
Speaker
And how do I support that task to enforce a behavior change to move to the next stage? Now what I need to sell? What tasks do I need to help them complete? And then can I do that via marketing and sequencing to support to ensure that happens? The seller’s still involved, but we’re scaling the outreach and we’re scaling all of that so the seller can concentrate on what? Talking with you, talking with me. And I think if we get people going down that path and start trying to just train everybody on everything, but be omnipresent and then use technologies to help scale the multi -channel piece, I guess an exciting new world. Yeah, and I think having been on the sale side, look, the dream state for me is the CMO is to look at calendars and see like at minimum four to six hours of prospect interactions, whether that’s demos, napkin demos, live calls.
23:08-23:46
Speaker
I don’t wanna see, hi, I was stuck writing this sequence for 2.5 hours, even with GPT. Like that’s not maximizing the productivity for that person. So on the marketing side, like we can be a good partner and lift that for them and preload it, but the personalization aspect is so key. And I think we’ve talked about this a lot in the past is like, multiple touch points, different stakeholders, each stakeholder, like a VP cares about something differently than say a manager of RevOps would, like taking even those few seconds to the dinner plate that’s been served up, customize it, sprinkle whatever you need on top of that and it’s out the door.
23:47-24:33
Speaker
And I think that that partnership takes time. I think it’s a bit of a dance and understanding like, how do we deliver on the short -term things that maybe are immediate for this quarter? Well, also saying, could we just set these things up to run, right, run against ICP, Canvas and cross thread, meaning we’re looking at everything from trade shows to events to physical activations. And even in 2024, still coming up again, like the idea of direct mailing and all these different areas, it’s marketing cross threads that in the background. Now it’s not as glorified and gorgeous as a closed one, but if you go back and I’m thinking about some, a very large retail company at a former organization that they were like, oh, this was an eight month close and only six touches, five of which were sales.
24:34-25:21
Speaker
And when we go all the way back to that first touch, it was 2 .5 years with 87 touches, starting with a random anonymized website visit, webinar, multiple webinars. Sometimes they would mask and use personal emails, right? We had inbound phone calls, where again, they called from a personal number, so didn’t dig in the CRM. We had multiple emails, multiple downloads, multiple actions, false starts on demos, and then they back out, they left the org, they came back to the org. I mean, it was astonishing to see the level of multiple touches across all these different channels, SMS, email, direct mail, website, that marketing was back there kind of looming that tapestry in the background while sales was actively calling down on those contacts.
25:22-26:07
Speaker
And it took something that looked like, oh, there was only a small thing here, and I’m like the influencer was so much greater than that. And it continued through the point of enablement and implementation because we had a great customer marketer who was just like constantly evangelizing the product and getting people deep in the root, deep in the root so that you retain them and grow and cross -sell and upsell within that org. And so it did become omnipresent. It took a while to get that motion going, but once it was there, it became a mechanism that made sales activations more successful and at the end of the day, that’s it. Like we’re here to make revenue. Revenue is everyone’s job. And I think that for me, that’s a mission critical element in both the culture and the behavior of both marketing, sales, CS, et cetera.
26:08-26:54
Speaker
All day long, can I just say, Brandee, if we can sit there and if every executive around the world that’s in a CMO or head of sales, whatever their job may be, and if they could experience what you just said, where at the end of the day, sales reps are waking up going, oh no, it’s just five touches, dead easy. I’m gonna say job well done, because the end of the day, I don’t want people to know all of what actually went into it. The 84 different sequences, touches, and the multiple years and all of that. If we go back to the headline of this call of driving behavior change, let’s make the seller experience so good, so easy, that’s all they think it is.
26:55-27:56
Speaker
That’s a great outcome, because that’s where you get momentum, get people excited, and that is a sales world where I think sellers can be happy and more successful looking. So wonderful success story. With that said, Brandee, unfortunately, we are out of time. We will have you back. I get to work with you all the time, so we will carry on our conversation as always internally, but for the audience, do reach out to us and you continue to ask questions, reach out to Brandee Sanders as well, but Brandee, we love to finish up, always with limited trivia. Just to have a little bit of fun and elevate this conversation, but it’s okay, I’m gonna give you a question with four choices of the answer, all right? We’ll see how well you do. So this is around behavior change, building off of some of the garden research and some other sources, and what we see is behavior change company that we’ve been at this more than 10 years with our data.
27:57-28:28
Speaker
So here’s the question. On average, how much faster does technology adoption in sales occur? When organizations focus on driving behavior change in addition to simply just training people how to use the tech. A, 10% faster, B, 25% faster, C, 50% faster, D, 75% faster.
28:29-29:10
Speaker
This is a good question. This is a good one. I mean, all right, so just from experience, it would have to be more than 10 and 25. In an optimistic world, I would want to say 75, but there’s the natural maturity index for this adoption. So I’m stuck, 25, 50. I’m gonna guess 50. You are a winner. 50% improvement. And think about that. 50%, every hour, every piece, you’re gaining 50% back simply by actually making sure that you prioritize behavior change alongside the adoption of a technology.
29:11-30:01
Speaker
So picking technology that can actually have the aperture and the focus on behavior change, you’re getting 50% faster at the adoption and the effect of those technologies. Amazing gains. Brandee, great guess, well, not guess. Good answer, you got it, way to go. So wonderful to have you on. It’s great as always to see you. Again, Brandee Sanders, Chief Marketing Officer from revenue .io. For everybody listening in, please remember to like and subscribe, sending your questions to myself, Howard and Brandee. And we will absolutely get to them in a future episode. And Brandee, we’ll have you back on soon. Wonderful. Thanks for having me. See you all soon. Thanks so much.
