Ampliz Podcast

Saurabh Madan oversees Moengage's go-to-market and customer success initiatives in South East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Based out of Singapore, Saurabh has had over 15 years of experience in Sales & Business Development. He is a writer, tech enthusiast, writer, and sales coach.

At the B2B binge APAC edition, he spoke about one of the most significant challenges marketing and sales folks across the globe face – the mindset of the buyer. Companies have been trying to unravel the secrets of understanding the buyer mindset always. Many companies have tried various methods to do it and have succeeded relatively. However, the process isn't homogenous yet. It may work for one but may not work for another. So the experimentation has to go on.

Understanding of the customer starts with the discovery and backward to selling. Find there is a need or problem that requires solving. Find it and talk about then devise a sales pitch that works for them.  Directly jumping into a sales pitch is not justified for both the parties. You don't know what they want, and the customers are being taken for granted. A salesperson should never do that in his right frame of the mind.

Therefore, there has to be the right modus operandi of communication between the two. Discover more data points about the customer better. You are off understanding them. You have to realize that everyone is buying. Everyone in your funnel is buying.

B2C and B2B buy very differently, and the way you discover the mindset is also quite different. For a B2C, there is plenty of data in the form of Data-lakes and massive databases that can be tabled and presented in the form of graphs and charts to help you understand your enormous number of customers you are targeting.  Organizations employ large data engine to gain this inference.

But for a B2B, the idea is entirely different. Each one of them has a unique need and cannot be generalized to an enormous mass of customers. The more conversations you make, the better you understand your customers. You cannot generalize your product, but you can make slight customizations to suit your customers. To make those customizations, you have to understand the customers deeply. It needs many conversations. With LinkedIn, you can cluster many similar profiles, but it won't help you group based on the mindset. In a discovery call, try to understand the below few things:

1. What are you solving?
   
2. What are your customers' issues?
   
3. What is the problem they have identified and able to solve?
   
4. What are the problems they have identified and not able to solve?
   
5. Of all the problems they face and trying to solve, can you do better at solving the problems?
   
6. How will you impact them in terms of sales, revenues, KPIs, and other forms of impact?
   

Build your reputation with your customers so that they open up to you. To build a personal rapport, you have to be genuine and find that commonality between you and your client. Then make the relationship on the commonality. Unravel the mystery behind their needs and problems by continually talking to them and understanding them.

Mona Lolas is an accomplished Global Sales and Marketing Executive with over 25 years of experience in the IT industry. She has international exposure in conducting business in Australia, APAC Regional, and Global roles working in Vendors and Blue-Chip Companies. Mona has built new business lines, bringing new products to market and establishing vendor's presence in the Asia Pacific region. She holds extensive experience in go-to-market plans that directly support business growth objectives and drive significant and measurable ROI - increasing demand, driving sales, and positively impacting brand equity. Mona has led highly skilled marketing teams that deliver engagement with the channel and end-users and continuously learn through evaluation and iteration. Mona has a passion for promoting women in leadership positions and advocating empowering girls join the IT industry.

Mona showered Ampliz B2B 4th Edition with her immense knowledge and spoke elaborately on how important it is to align sales and marketing.  Alignment in sales and marketing comes from the top of the organization. The message has to be crisp and clean from top to bottom. The value you offer to your stakeholders should be communicated across your organization equally. CSO and CMO are the keystones in this endeavor of creating alignment. They have to communicate effectively to align both the teams.

Marketing and Sales KPIs should be focused on delivering value to your stakeholders while speaking the same language. Marketing will control the channels and talk about the language that aligns with sales and your target audience. It asks from marketing much focus on what they are doing, what they cannot do while maintaining alignment with the sales. Marketing activities should not spread too thin.

Prioritize the role of marketing and have the objectives mapped out and aligned with the overall aim of the organization. As said before, it should come from the top to bottom. The organization's purpose should breakdown slowly into department objectives to team objectives to personal goals.

Sudhir Nayar is the Managing Director of Commercial Sales at Cisco. For the past 30 years, he has led IT sales operations by creating skilled and empowered teams. In the process, he has mentored budding leaders for the Indian IT industry. Sudhir leads IT sales teams across large enterprises and SMB, built and transformed channels, developed a corporate strategy for leading IT companies like Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Microsoft, and Cisco. He is always looking out to participate in industry forums to learn, share my perspectives, and interact with like-minded professionals on digital platforms. Sudhir is an eloquent speaker, great mentor, environmentalist, Strategic Leader Focused On Revenue, Growth, and Profit Maximisation.

At Ampliz B2b Binge, he spoke elaborately on how to build high performing and resilient sales teams. He has outlined five steps to building transformative teams.

1. Build trust within the team

2. Focus on the health of the business

3. Building a winning culture

4. Formulate a three-year plan

5. Effective communication

Build trust

Listen more. The first time you meet your team, talk to teammates about their success, how can, as an organization, you can help them grow and ask how can you help them achieve the goals. When you ask them these sets of questions, they start opening up to you. Your teammate becomes a little chatty and starts trusting you. Go back to them and tell them what can be done now and what can be done later. Focus on their strength and try to leverage them.

Focus on the health of the business

Most businesses focus on topline and bottom line. However, as a leader, you should focus on what is coming in the future and prepare your team. Keep an eye out for the changing trends and communicate it to your teams regularly. Please encourage them to adapt to the changes and keep learning new things.

Build a winning culture

Build culture by inspiring them and giving them a sense of safety. When people feel safe and hopeful, they can choose to go beyond what is expected of them. Then your job changes form inspecting to inspiring people. Your work now is instilling hope in them. That is when the time arises, they give more than 100% of their abilities. Accept failure and foster growth and nurturing.

Formulate a 3 Year plan

As a leader amongst leaders, you should have a six month, one year, and a three-year plan—Breakdown the big picture in your mind into bite-size achievable chunks to make things easier.

Communication Plan

All the plans and the above-mentioned activities will fail if you don't have a concrete communication plan. Understand who are your key stakeholders are and what their priorities are. Focus on how you can align the priorities to achieve the goals. But it has to be adequately communicated. Therefore, have a communication plan that aligns with your key stakeholders and speaks their language.

Utkarsh serves as the Head of Business Development for SAP Asia Pacific and Japan. Based in Singapore, Utkarsh is responsible for market development strategies and sales programs across Asia-Pacific and Japan to realize the potential and future proof of SAP's long term vision. Leading with a customer-first mindset, he has a proven track record of developing sales and business development strategies that enable Intelligent and connected enterprises enabled through a best in class Experience Management.

Utkarsh is passionate about the digital economy and its implications for the customers and the broader ecosystem of SAP. In a leadership career spanning 15 years, he has worked on Product development and management, customer lifecycle, Business transformation, People Leadership, Sales, and Business Development.

At Ampliz B2B Binge APAC edition Utkarsh delivers insight into various kinds of experiences customers have. How understanding and leveraging experiences can foster growth? Providing expertise is the most critical factor that has governed the development of the most influential organizations in the world. Experiences are the interactions that people have with the organization. If you can manage it, you can provide the best possible experiences.

66% leave brands due to lousy brand experiences, and 95% share it on social media. Any occasion, good or bad, always escalates across communities. Whether you want it or not, the bad experiences escalate faster. Therefore, organizations prepare well ahead in time for various scenarios.

User experience and customer experience are two integral parts of the experience management. User experience deals with providing the best possible experience while using the product but the customer experience deals with the complete lifecycle of the customer. Customer experience goes from the first touchpoint to the last touchpoint in the lifecycle. In some cases may extend beyond it.

The industry is willing to spend billions of dollars on it. The experience is so important because it is the experiences that make you trust a brand and later on purchase from them. Experiences lead to a better social presence that leads to the creation of business opportunities. Research says there are seven touchpoints before someone becomes your customer. So you have seven chances to provide and build on great experiences. With each experience, you have an opportunity to get a customer. The loyalty increases, and you can upsell your products, which leads to the growth of the top line.

The question now arises how do you build experience. The answer lies in data. Organizations have to manage experience from end to end the journey of the customer. Measure every possible interaction. Experiment and save the data and apply measurable inferences to improve the experience. The biggest challenge and opportunity for an organization is to have a single source of truth or information. The challenge lies in administrating the relevant information. The most effective option is everyone has the information about the prospect and at what stage the potential is in. Having this knowledge provides the right opportunity to create great experiences.

Fernando Angulo has 10+ years of experience in digital marketing. He is currently Heads Communications at SEMrush Inc. Fernando is actively involved in the search marketing world and a regular speaker at Digital Marketing and Ecommerce conferences and events worldwide. He specializes in Competitive Intelligence and Competitors Research, SEO, and Paid Traffic Strategies for eCommerce and online business.

When 77% of the company focused on content marketing, only 48% can explain their strategy. It's mind-boggling to see that less than 50% of people have an in-depth understanding of content marketing. On average, they spend less than USD10000 on content marketing. The significant challenges faced by the organization is generating quality leads from the content and generating quality content.

The quality content is one that aligns one with your target persona. Organizations should spend time creating various formats of written content and find what aligns with your customer. Once you ascertain what your target persona want, optimize your content for SEO and target persona. The format becomes the brand language that can help you generate more qualified leads that resonate with you.

Follow the praetor principle of the 80-20 ratio. Spend 20% time writing or creating content and 80% of time distributing it. The main channels are social media, email,  and various other channels. The primary sources of traffic still search and direct traffic. The customers are looking for more valuable and conversational content, answers to their questions. They are trying for a more featured snippet. The featured snippets are the primary source of creating brand impact.

Measure the impact of your content through the social media channels, direct traffic, and the quality of leads generated. So have a flow set for your content marketing. Analyze your content and create a plan for it.  Then act on your schedule, monitor the activities related to your content, and maximize the impact by sharing on social media, optimizing SEO, and link building exercises.

Create long-form content with words exceeding 810 words. Cover the topic in detail and add as much value as possible. Answer as many questions as possible that genuinely answer to the queries of your target audience. Have a structure to your content and repurpose them to different formats to make it easily consumable.

Namrata Kapur is the Head of Marketing of the Cloud Integration Department of IBM. She is also the host of the vlogging series Marketer in tech. She is also a writer, speaker, and mentor.

At Ampliz B2B Binge 4.0 APAC edition, she shares nuggets of knowledge regarding measuring the KPIs that matter to business growth. Marketing goes beyond awareness today. It has every nook and corner of different processes.

All KPIs of various departments are interrelated. They have to club into a bucket so that they are focused on the right ROIs. ROIs are achievements of business goals. The business goals are leads generated, do prospects know your offering, how do you differentiate from your competitors, are different teams are aligned, and many others.

One of the most significant ROIs is the Share of Voice. Share of voice measures how your presence compares across competitors. Do your activities contribute to the above ROI?

Are you driving the right traffic? Do the events or various activities bring in the right traffic? How are you actively pursuing them? What are your conversion rates to and of leads?

When organizations ask what is your plan for the next quarter. It means how you can reach the goals and your tactics—all your steps involved in the tactic need to have KPIs and ROIs. When you have all that information in place, it will help you achieve the goals.

The best way the organizations can achieve great ROIs iff the KPIs are aligned to it. The way to go about achieving the KPIs is to plan, execute, analyze, and adapt. Plan meticulously, perform consistently, analyze honestly, and adapt ruthlessly. There is no other way.

It does not matter you follow a funnel, pipe, or a flywheel; every stage you interact must have specific things you want to achieve or ROIs. To reach the ROI numbers, you should have small measurable KPIs so that you can measure and take necessary actions to realign your actions.

Adarsh Noronha leads Hubspot's growth efforts in India. Adarsh is responsible for HubSpot's sales and revenue across India and will be based in HubSpot's Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore. Before joining HubSpot, Adarsh was General Manager and Senior Sales Director at Oracle, where he led the customer experience business in India, helping enterprises in the region with digital transformation. Before Oracle, he served as Country Manager at Informatica and spent six years in sales leadership positions at Salesforce India.

At Ampliz B2B Binge 4.0 APAC Edition, Adarsh focused on the growth of the business through the flywheel concept. According to him, customers have changed the way they function and their behavior. They are more critical and impatient than before. They expect an immediate response from customer service representatives. Gaining their trust is the biggest challenge the marketers and sales folks are facing.

People trust their friends and colleagues. Therefore, word of mouth becomes the most significant source of truth and trust for the customers. The customers trust the information coming from their friends. Businesses are failing to adapt to this change.

Businesses have adopted inbound marketing method in totality. They are attracting, engaging, and trying their every bit to delight the customers. It is one of the biggest challenges they are facing. The funnel was the holy grail of the businesses. The issue with the funnel is that it focuses on sales folks rather than the need of the customer.  Flywheel centers around the customer with content and various activities built around it.

Flywheel focuses on customers and allows them to bring in customers that fit the bill with sales, marketing, and services built around customers. They start to rotate around the customer. It helps to attract more customers with the help of current customers.

Customer-focused flywheel engages, attracts, and delights the customers. They help to create experiences. The experiences make delight which they would want to share with their colleagues and friends. It helps in attracting the right kind of audience to your product. Customer delight is part of every section of the business, just not the customer success team. When joy becomes everyone's job, they become customer-obsessed.  Being customer-obsessed makes you put customer needs at the forefront and cater to them.

Being genuine is part of the delight. If you are honest, customers will come to you. The customers will accept you from their heart. Create every piece of content that resonates and shows that you understand them. The better you get at it, the more customers are attracted to you. You can convert them to sales easily. Be transparent with your pricing and build your transparency and credibility.

Sangram Vajre is the Co-founder at Terminus, 2x Author, Host of #FlipMyFunnel Podcast, and Speaker and loves doing #LinkedInLive. He is the foremost authority in Account-based marketing or ABM.

As one of the key speakers at the B2B Binge 4.0, US version, he sheds light on the three biggest mistakes the companies adopting ABM Strategy make. He also shares how to implement ABM strategy effectively, the right time to implement the process, and answers various queries of the audience.

So, coming to the mistakes most companies make are

1.  Too much focus on demand generation. Companies often forget that money is in the sales pipeline. Instead of just focusing on getting more and more people in the channel, focus on individual leads. Give them enough attention and care to convert them into leads. The more you focus on nurturing the leads, the better are your chances of converting them.

2.   Companies are spread too thin. Businesses try to focus on every product and service they have. Lack of focus is a significant issue. Take your best performing product or service to the market and evolve as the market needs. As you focus on a single product, you are very likely to care about every lead that comes for that product and will try to convert them into deals. The prospects will receive enough attention to become your customer. Focus all your efforts on a single product. If you are good at something in marketing, double down your efforts on that and make conversions happen. For example, if you are great at doing events double down on it and have fantastic events.

3.  Enterprises often forget that the brand drives the demand. Most companies are skeptical about spending dollars in the marketing budget during a crisis. During the crisis, be more data-oriented and focus on the areas of marketing that is yielding results. Improve and make more efforts on the channel. Make the best out of those channels. Once you start doing this, leads will start flowing in. During a crisis, people become strict with their spending. They want to put the money in the right places. Unless you market yourself in that way, businesses won't make a deal with you. So keep nurturing your brand during the crisis. Make yourself visible to others while you double down on the marketing efforts that are working for you.

Create the best possible marketing ecosystem around your product that makes your leads and customers feel valued. If they don't feel valued, they will not invest in your product even though you claim to have the world’s best product.  It can help you rise above the noise and will help you build the most significant possible brand you can be then.

Focusing your efforts in a single direction will take you a long way than a distributed focus over many things. Account-based marketing is about having focused efforts on leads and converting them to leads.

GuruPandian is chief of growth and product at Ampliz. He has extensive experience in working with B2B data companies like ZoomInfo (now DiscoverOrg Zoominfo).  He is a speaker and a great mentor.

Here at Ampliz B2B Binge, he speaks about how B2B data has evolved over the years and how it can help businesses achieve their goals. Today marketing has a sole focus that is growth. The growth always boils down to lead generation, lead nurturing, and sales, irrespective of whatever activities you perform every day. So growth is about what is your lead volume and deals velocity? It means how many leads are coming in every day and how quickly those leads are converted into deals.

Traditionally b2B data was acquired from events, website forms, signups, collateral downloads, LinkedIn, and many other places of interest. Most of the time, the data-points include the name of the person, email address, company, industry, designation, number of employees, and other factors. Traditional data partners not only help you find new leads but also append data and enrich existing data. Data maintenance is increasing, with so many changes happening around the world. Maintain a single cell of data costs as much as 100$ on an average.

Modern B2B data partners, in addition to the above traditional data, also try to provide behavioral data, proxy intent, better contact directories, and improved company firm-o-graphics information. They will personalize data for you. The sales intelligence will be customized for you based on your needs, the persona you are targeting. A right B2b data partner will have a global scale; maintain high data standards with capabilities to take care of personalized data requests.

Tibor Shanto is a Pre-Discovery Specialist driving conversion & pipeline creation via improved execution. He helps B2B companies translate sales strategy to reality and was often called a brilliant sales tactician, obsessed with implementation.

Tibor helps sellers align their process with buyers' decision and buying process. He specializes in prospecting and communicating value in a way that drives access to and action from decision-makers. Tibor makes his clients regularly see a double-digit increase in opportunities and pipeline values. He works with companies from Fortune 50 to start-ups achieve their revenue goals.

Tibor Shanto at B2B Binge 4th edition focused on three mistakes most sales reps make while prospecting on the telephone. The three mistakes he mentioned are, most of the time, easily overlooked by most sales reps.

1.  Accept who you are: It means understanding who you are and what do you represent. Understand what you are set out to do every day. Develop an understanding of your prospect and treat them as such. Your prospects are trying to do fit a lot in a day. Your call will interfere in their plan. Make their time worthwhile when they agree to talk to you. You should know that you are not the only meddling in their business. Therefore, develop an understanding of the challenges your prospect might be facing.

2.  There is nothing social about telephone prospecting: Think in a counter-intuitive manner. Understand that you are going to interfere in someone's schedule. They are also wanted to end those interferences and get back to what they were doing. So take a look from the customer point of view and understand what is of value to them.

3.   Expand your toolkit: The one who is prospecting has to understand that the channel you are comfortable with that may not be the case with your prospect.  Not everybody thinks like you.  Contact the lead through the channel they are pleased with. So you have to expand your expertise across various channels.