The Daily Briefing: May 11, 2020

In today’s Daily Briefing, Jim Benton was joined by Olivier L'Abbé, President of Metadata.io. They discussed how Revenue Leaders can support their sales teams while their deals come under higher scrutiny.

Here are the numbers:

• Meeting volume is up 7% from last week
• Sales Leaders joining 69% more meetings since January
• Buying-side Leaders joining 65% more meetings since January

Targeted, dynamic ABM can lead to more meeting success #

Chorus reported a 7% increase in meetings last week. Sales teams seem to be adapting to the current environment and are improving upon tested strategies to increase productivity.

“We had the best month in history last month,” said Olivier. “70% higher than we’ve ever done. We automate a large part of marketing,” he added, “We help companies evaluate whether a former ICP is the same ICP you should be targeting today.”

Dynamic ABM right now is essential. “It’s helping to prioritize the accounts and deprioritize others,” said Jim.

Metadata.io has seen recent success with a specific ABM approach. Olivier shared this success, and how his team has been able to move the needle.

“We’ve been using LinkedIn Conversational Ads,” he said. “Using our own product, we know our ICP audiences really well. So we offer $100 to DoorDash if they book a meeting with us. We’ve shifted spend from field marketing to offers like this.”

Part of the success of this campaign is due to the environment we all find ourselves in now. “Website traffic is way up,” said Olivier, “So a lot of our customers who are doubling down on ad spend are seeing amazing results because there’s more traction online. There are lower acquisition costs right now.”

This should sound familiar. We have heard a similar sentiment from Vinay Bhagat when he joined Jim on April 22: “Some companies have pulled their ad spending. I think it’s a mistake,” Vinay had said.

Many companies are drawing on the learnings from 2008, while others are repeating this mistake.

The same concern pops up when deploying these types of offer strategies: Are these booked meetings qualified? Olivier says yes.

“On our side, we’re seeing these are quality meetings. We’ve run data recently and the top 40% of our customers are spending significantly more than what they were before.

Mid-Market and Enterprise teams are able to shift more quickly and can invest directly into driving top of funnel leads. Which all companies need right now if you want to smooth out Q2 and Q3 and keep your sales teams busy.”

Nevertheless, there are steps a company must take to ensure lead quality and to not waste money, time, or effort.

“I’ve never worked at a company where the inbound engine was this strong,” said Olivier. “We’re really lucky, we’re using our own secret sauce which is our product. We use our own tool, we identify the ICP. Before we spend a single dollar, we preview who we’re targeting. We try to remove it to be super effective. We only show ads to people who are specific to our ICP.”

ROI Calculators, leadership in sales meetings proving to be a unique challenge #

More people are involved to get deals done. Moving deals from open to close continues to be slowed by the amount of scrutiny placed on the essential nature of the product, and its ROI.

“People are doing a lot of research right now,” said Olivier. “They need to know if their old plan would work in today’s environment. People are willing to educate themselves. For us, going from Stage 5 Commit to Closed-Won is taking 40% longer. We are now going after smaller deals. We now have to engage with CFOs, so that last step is taking longer. There’s not a lot we can do, except have an ROI calculator.”

ROI calculators are not new to the sales process, but there has been an increased dependence upon them. Jim asked if the ROI calculators that Olivier and his team are using have taken a different form to accommodate the current climate.

“This is new for us,” said Olivier, “We’re going to use it as a demand channel in the long run. We want people to come to us and be able to see the ROI from our site. We do these analyses, we’ll look at the data cost - it costs a lot of money to have good data - we help companies reduce their costs. We are going to put it on our website in an easy to use format.”

It comes down to the story your ROI calculator is able to tell. “This is the story we have to tell to the CEO,” said Olivier, “Are you going to drive revenue for the company? Are you going to cut costs? That’s what they care about.”

To support their teams going into meetings with upper-level executives that they may not have interfaced with before, Olivier leverages reviews.

“I was at G2 for a few years,” he said. “I’m a big believer in reviews. We’re leveraging these as much as possible.”

Continue to iterate your team’s involvement and motivation #

Successful meetings are dependent upon a strong team, willing and motivated to see the deal through to the end. Moving to a fully remote structure, with the pressures of Shelter in Place mounting, it’s important to evaluate your processes and your team engagement, as much as you evaluate your messaging.

“Eight weeks is a long time,” said Olivier, speaking to his team’s commitment to staying motivated. “We were already a super remote culture, it hasn’t affected us as much as other companies. We do daily meetings to share as a team. We have someone that ends the meeting with an inspirational quote. We’ve been doing this for 8 weeks, and we’re now evaluating how to improve it.”