Episode 322: Bridging Sales and Marketing in the Digital Age: Insights and Strategies

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:00:00 – (Brynne Tillman): What I’m most interested in learning from you today and sharing with our community is this bridge that has to happen between sales and marketing. My question to you is, why do salespeople need to understand the role of marketing in 2024 and beyond?

0:00:19 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI.

0:00:58 – (Bob Woods): Start your journey for free by joining our resource library@socialsaleslink.com library welcome to the show.

0:01:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to making sales social. I’m very excited to have my guest today, Michael Hansen, who empowers b two b sales teams to better conversations. He’s the host of the Cosmic Bridge podcast and CEO at Growth Genie. Michael, welcome to the show.

0:01:31 – (Michael Hanson): Yeah, thanks a lot for having me, Brynne. Looking forward to today’s chat.

0:01:35 – (Brynne Tillman): Thrilled to have you. It’s interesting. I found you because you put out a very interesting poll that got my attention, and so now you’re here. So I’ll start with content on LinkedIn works. So that’s what I’ll mention because polls are our content. So anyway, I’m thrilled to have you here. Before we jump into your expertise, we ask all of our guests one question, which is, what does making sales social mean to you?

0:02:05 – (Michael Hanson): Yeah, I think I’ll just stick to LinkedIn as I’m not dabbled in other channels, but I definitely would say LinkedIn is more of my expertise. And I think you’ve really got two aspects of LinkedIn, and I feel like one is more marketing, which I know we’re going to talk about later, and one is more sales. And I feel like the sales part is directly messaging customers in the DM’s or prospects. That could be voice notes, videos, just a normal written message, or researching accounts you’ve got in the pipeline.

0:02:37 – (Michael Hanson): And then on the other side, which I think is more of a marketing play, like, you talked about earlier, like posting on LinkedIn, building brand awareness, it could be of yourself or your company. And for me, that’s more of like- a marketing play because that’s more like building a brand. And obviously good things can happen. Like as you said, we’re doing this, this podcast because of that. But also I’ve had various things happen through posting on LinkedIn.

0:02:59 – (Michael Hanson): Whether it’s obviously getting new business leads is great, but it can even be like deals you’ve already got in the pipeline. And like, oh, you know, I really enjoyed the content you posted. And there’s often, I think, a conversation now around, like, should content be personal or should it be business? Obviously, LinkedIn’s a business platform, so I tried to keep like, say, 80% of the content quite businessly. But, you know, often the ten to 20% of stuff that’s a little bit more personal, people will often clients or prospects or whatever will be like, oh, I follow you because of the sales stuff. But also, you mentioned you gave up alcohol. That’s interesting, because I gave up alcohol, or I’m thinking about giving up alcohol. Right? So often those things can drive conversations as well.

0:03:40 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. So that’s going to lead really into what I’m most interested in learning from you today and sharing with our community is this bridge that has to happen between sales and marketing. They’ve been siloed traditionally for so many years. And, you know, you have that old conversation with marketing. It’s like, why isn’t sales closing our leads? And sales is why aren’t our leads better? Right? And so really, in today’s modern selling world, it’s a digital world for sales and for marketing, they really have to work in-tandem. So my question to you is, why do salespeople need to understand the role of marketing in 2024 and beyond?

0:04:29 – (Brynne Tillman): And how can they actually leverage marketing and content for prospecting?

0:04:36 – (Michael Hanson): Yeah. So I think why is there that? I think it’s from HubSpot that everyone talks about that, like, buyers are 70% of the way through the funnel by the time they get to your website. So actually, if you’re a salesperson that kind of relies on marketing to drive people to the website, and they fill out a form, by that point, they may have already been in contact with other vendors who have more of a relationship there.

0:04:59 – (Michael Hanson): So I always say, what are the things that happen before they get to your website? And obviously, marketing is like pushing out content, but why can’t salespeople be doing that as well? But then I think the problem is that often salespeople share content in the wrong way. The classic example on LinkedIn is like, oh, I’m just going to repost the marketing blog that’s just been released. Right?  Without thinking about what’s in the blog, what are the highlights? We always think of trailers. And also, I think marketing works really well with sales.

0:05:30 – (Michael Hanson): If you write a 1500-word blog. What are the most interesting statistics or graphs or whatever in that blog? Because that’s stuff that you can show on LinkedIn. But also, I also say for, like, nurturing purposes, sometimes you speak to a lead. It’s not the right time. But within the next six months, you may, like every two weeks, like, share an interesting stat or piece of content with them. Or even you’re now seeing individual salespeople at companies. They’re not just, like, posting on LinkedIn. Some people even, like, have their own newsletters, right? And they’re literally like, almost creating this funnel for themselves, like, individual salespeople.

0:06:07 – (Michael Hanson): So, yeah, the why is that, What, most of the conversations about sales now are happening when you’re not in the room. People don’t want to speak to salespeople, so they know they have to get a proposal and whatever else. But most of the conversations are happening with their colleagues. So what’s, like, useful content that you can share when they’re not in the room? And then again, think, like, snippets of those content. Don’t just, like, share, like, really long podcasts or videos or webinars or whatever. Think of, like, what’s, like, micro-content that’s easily digestible.

0:06:37 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that. One of the things I learned, I don’t know if you know David Newman. He wrote to do it marketing. One of the most important lessons I learned from him probably 15 years ago was to understand what your prospect is, what content, and what insights are your prospects looking for before they’re at the stage that they need you. So that you’re getting them early in the buying process. And I always thought, like, that was always, that’s always in my mind, like, am I talking to them too late? when they filled out the form? or am I talking to them when they’re just exploring a challenge that’s coming up before they need me? So in your expertise, talk a little bit about the kind of content that salespeople should be sharing to really attract their buyers at the right time.

0:07:34 – (Michael Hanson): Yeah, I can give an example. Like, I think the big kind of takeaway, I would say, for people listening is to think of content that is useful whether people buy from you or not. And that’s sometimes a very difficult thing for salespeople to think about, because it’s like, oh, this content may just be helpful even if they don’t buy my product. Right? Because that says, like, I run a sales training company, and if I were to share a piece of content, it’s like ten reasons you should outsource sales training. It’s very obvious where I’m trying to do it. Not helpful. Right?

0:08:06 – (Michael Hanson): Whereas if it was like, hey, you mentioned when we last spoke that you are hiring salespeople in Germany. Here are ten interview questions for salespeople in the German market. That’s super specific to what they mentioned. So that’s also where the two things can go together is use your sales calls, not just as things to customize your proposal and, but also use them as calls for research that you can then adapt the content that you’re sharing with them as well.

0:08:38 – (Brynne Tillman): See, that’s terrific. We often say that’s leading to your solution, not with your solution. When you’re leading. Right. When you lead with your solution, it’s clearly a pitch. When you lead to your solution, it’s, wow, this is great. So I love that you’re talking about that. Now, obviously we can share content on, you know, we can post it on LinkedIn, we can get it into the inbox. But how do we now convert that conversation? So now we’ve sent this out, maybe we’ve got likes and comments from a few people we want a conversation with.

0:09:14 – (Brynne Tillman): Maybe we got into the inbox of someone and we got a response that said, thanks. What is your next step? How do you convert that from someone who is consuming your content to someone who wants to talk to you about what you do?

0:09:30 – (Michael Hanson): Yeah, it’s a great question. I think this often comes up with because when we do sales training, are thinking about how to think like marketers and use marketing content to drive sales conversations. And this is often the thing that happens, people start to drive some awareness and, okay, how do I actually get these people to spend 30 minutes with me? Yeah, maybe I can give an example. Recently we shared, or, I shared on my LinkedIn, a new playbook template we released, which is, we released a sales playbook template about 18 months ago, and that was very popular. About 600 people requested it.

0:10:02 – (Michael Hanson): This one was more for customer success. Managers, people who were working like upsells, renewals, and stuff, which is kind of a bit of our business that has been growing, weren’t as popular as the sales playwrights. Maybe about 50 people requested it. And then I would say maybe 15 of those were potential leads for our business that were qualified. So they were managers, directors, VPS, etc. And then, yeah, you don’t want to be, hey, you requested the Playbook template. Do you want to discuss sales training? Because the jump is too far there.

0:10:32 – (Michael Hanson): But it’s okay if they’re interested in the customer sales. The customer success playbook may also problem that they’re having that is related to that. And often playbooks are used in the onboarding process. So then I would send a follow-up message. They say, hey, thanks for the playbook. And I say, hey, I’m happy to run you through some of the key parts of the playbook that may help when you’re onboarding your new customer success. Managers and I were able to generate a few meetings that way.

0:10:59 – (Michael Hanson): So, yeah, it’s thinking like, if they’ve requested if they, if they like a piece of content, what are the challenges in that piece of content that they may be having? Right. So it’s like looking at those common denominators.

0:11:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So that’s fantastic. I love that. Often we’ll say I have additional insights, but what you’re saying is, is great.

0:11:17 – (Michael Hanson): Yes.

0:11:17 – (Brynne Tillman): So let’s look at the process. So you share a piece of content, and if you do a lot of what we do we take inventory of our connections. And I want to get this into the inbox of 40 people. They engage, and maybe ten of them of the 40 engage. And now you’re in your content, you have a little kind of teaser with insights. And then you say, if you’re interested in the full playbook, let me know. I’m happy to send it over to you. Is that your call to action there?

0:11:53 – (Michael Hanson): Yes. Yeah, exactly as you mentioned. And then you can share the playbook. And then obviously the next thing could be up. Do you want to run through some of the highlights of the playbook that can help you with onboarding or whatever you think the pain may be for the person? So that’s exactly it. And I think, yeah. Marketing, well, good marketers, not all marketers are obviously trained to think about like, trailers and snippets, but I think my experience as a majority of salespeople will just be like, hey, here’s a 400-page ebook, or like, here’s a 1-hour podcast. It’s like if they’re a stranger and they don’t know who you are.

0:12:22 – (Michael Hanson): Different people. Yeah, I think, yes, people. And, you know, I’m not one of those people that says people don’t listen to long-form content. People do listen to long-form content, but there has to be some type of authority that that person has. And if it’s a stranger who doesn’t know who you are, they’re probably not going to listen to 1-hour podcast. So.

0:12:40 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, so I don’t know if you’ve read Gap Selling by Keenan, but he talks about mastering the ask-offer ratio. And so you have to earn the right. So you’re asking them to invest their time to consume your content. You have to earn the right for them to want to pay for your content with their time. So.

0:12:59 – (Michael Hanson): Yes, exactly. Yeah.

0:13:00 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So, so that, that’s amazing. You’ve got some great insights. The next thing I’m going to ask you is what do you do if you’re in sales and you really don’t have the support of a marketing team? How do you overcome that?

0:13:19 – (Michael Hanson): Yeah, so this is an objection. We get in our training a lot when we talk about using content more. And often salespeople say our marketing content sucks. Like our marketing team’s terrible. They like, don’t listen to our requests. Sometimes that’s justified, sometimes that isn’t. But don’t get too much into that. But regardless, let’s say the content, you don’t have good content internally. Now you can use third-party content, right? So there are obviously two options. One, you can create your own content on LinkedIn, right? like we talked about.

0:13:49 – (Michael Hanson): And again, you could just post once a week because obviously people like you and I, you know, posting most days, but if you’ve never posted at all on LinkedIn like posting every day is, is a big time and sometimes it’s quite intimidating for people as well. So maybe commit to posting once a day. And in terms of getting inspiration, if you do genuinely think your content is not useful for, your prospects and the people you speak to, look at alternative sources as well, right? Look at like third-party sources. So I often share content from like Salesforce or Gong or people who are big in the sales tech space because I know we sell to heads of sales and they’re looking at that type of content as well.

0:14:26 – (Michael Hanson): And they’ve, you know, we’re a small company, we’ve worked with 60 customers in our history, whereas obviously they’ve got a lot more data, right? Gongs analyze millions of calls, right? Salesforce has millions of deals in their CRMs across with their customers. So yeah, sometimes using that data builds credibility. But then I also come in with my own perspective because that’s also the thing on LinkedIn that I think people get wrong. Like when you reshare the company blog, you’ve got no, yeah, no trailer and also no opinion as well. Like even if I share something from Salesforce or Gong, whatever it is, I try to give my opinion of based on my training with thousands of salespeople I’ve actually seen what they’re talking about is correct here.

0:15:10 – (Michael Hanson): And this is actually a little additional insight that I reckon recommend as well.

0:15:15 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that you’re adding your own thought leadership to their thought leadership.

0:15:19 – (Michael Hanson): Exactly. Yeah.

0:15:21 – (Brynne Tillman): Talk to me a little bit about your perspective on ChatGPT for salespeople in creating content.

0:15:31 – (Michael Hanson): Yeah, in terms of content. And then, yeah, I think this is relevant both for, like, a lot of what we do. Obviously, I talked a lot about marketing today, but it’s teaching me about outbound, how to write an outbound LinkedIn message or a voice or a cold call or whatever it is. And I see people do the wrong thing where they’re like, let’s just imagine I’m trying to sell you podcast editing services or something, and it’s like, hey, write me a letter selling, sorry, write me an email writing to Brynne to sell podcast editing. So ChatGPT is going to come up with, like, a load of rubbish.

0:16:04 – (Michael Hanson): Whereas if I was to say, to ChatGPT, tell me more about Brynne, tell me more about what she’s done in the past few years. It may give me some interesting information. And I actually do this now in sales calls. I do like a bit of an inception where I say most people are using AI in the wrong way, but we think AI is really good for researching companies. So the other day I had a call and I was like, tell me the big things that have happened in this company in the last three months.

0:16:30 – (Michael Hanson): They gave me three things. Then I brought it up on a call and I said, this is what we recommend salespeople are doing. Is this accurate, for your company? And she was like, yeah, number one is the number one thing we’re working on at the moment. So I kind of had that context. Yeah, I think AI is really good for research, but it’s not good for writing at the moment. I think the writing element, again, being your own authentic self, is like taking information from ChatGPT and then making it your own versus being lazy and being like, I want ChatGPT just to write all of my posts and my emails and stuff.

0:16:59 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s awesome. I love that. So one of the things that we do with salespeople is we have just a quick little prompt that says, ask me questions. Here’s what I want to do. Fill in the blank, right? Ask me questions one at a time. Let me answer. Once you have all the information you need, please use my answers only in creating the content. Do not research. So that’s a little bit of how we try to keep it authentic. But.

0:17:32 – (Brynne Tillman): So this was terrific. Thank you so much. Michael. My last question, or kind of the second to last question, my last question for the interview is, is there a question I should, or should have asked you that I didn’t?

0:17:44 – (Michael Hanson): I think with the ChatGPT thing, actually, I would say how can salespeople be more human and authentic? Because I think what chat GPT is going to do now is mean. The whole spam problem and robots are getting. One of the reasons I started my business five years ago is I noticed that all the heads of sales and marketing I was speaking to were like, I get so much spam so I don’t know how my sales team are like standing out now.

0:18:09 – (Michael Hanson): And now with AI, it’s got even worse. And there’s this big debate on LinkedIn. Like is AI going to replace salespeople’s jobs? And I think it will be for the people that just do a spray and pray, like a marketing campaign or spray and pray email campaign. Whereas the thing that ChatGPT is never going to be is like you and your own authentic views. So like, take time to write customized emails. Take time to write customized LinkedIn posts. As I said, use AI for research, but make it your own and make it your human. So the more you can be you and the more you can be human and stand out, the more you’re going to be successful in sales.

0:18:44 – (Brynne Tillman): Fantastic! Thank you so much. How can people, this is really the last question. How can people get in touch with you?

0:18:51 – (Michael Hanson): Yeah, obviously we got in contact on LinkedIn. So you’ve put Michael Hansen on LinkedIn and then if you go on our website growthgenie Co. You can learn more about what we do.

0:19:04 – (Brynne Tillman): Terrific! Thank you so much. This was great. I’m sure there are many people that got some good value from our conversation today and to our listeners. When you are out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

0:19:18 – (Bob Woods): Don’t miss an episode. Visit socialsaleslink.com podcast. Leave a review down below. Tell us what you think, what you learned, and what you want to hear from us next. Register for free resources at linkedinlibrary. You can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Play. Visit our website socialsaleslink.com for more information.

Outro:

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