Top Trends in B2B Sales and Marketing w/ William Wickey [Episode 465]

For sales reps, collaborating with marketing can be one of the most fruitful internal strategies.

William Wickey, Senior Manager of Content and Media Strategy
at LeadGenius, and one of the authors of an ebook, 2017 Trends & Tech Guide for B2B Sales & Marketing, joins me on this episode.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

LeadGenius, Ambition, and Prezi Business collaborated on the new book, 2017 Trends & Tech Guide for B2B Sales & Marketing. This is William’s second book collaboration with Ambition’s Jeremy Boudinet.

William explains how Trends & Tech guides are usually structured, and how this one varies. The authors looked for trends in B2B sales and marketing, and then mapped them to organizational needs, matching technologies to evaluate.

William talks about LeadGenius, and the market they serve with analytics and insights. He sees the same challenges and trends outside of tech as within the tech market.

William comments on the SDR function rising in inside sales, with the alignment of sales and marketing efforts.

The book is intended to reach markets that have not fully embraced tech tools for sales and marketing. William cites manufacturing and construction as examples.

William offers suggestions for adopting tech — outbound email solutions, such as PersistIQ, Outreach.io, and Yesware; and solutions for contact data strategy to allow targeted blasts to specific types of recipients.

Division of labor allows your reps to spend their time on the highest value activities that they can. Audit your reps’ time on various activities, and look for technologies to make those activities more effective.

Outbound can be personalized through mail merge and through targeting. The two efforts complement each other. William suggests a couple of ideas for targeting with the right data, accessing much more than name and address.

There is a lot of homogeneity to outbound emails. Go against the trite, expected content. Be specific to the contact. Consider video email.

Demonstrating relevance is a big step in the right direction. William is not impressed with zombie, auto-pilot email marketing.

Poor marketing and outreach give sales reps a poor response and a bad reputation.

Quantity over quality is not sustainable.

The Sales Enablement Podcast with Andy Paul was formerly Accelerate! with Andy Paul.