Understanding Buyer Intent

Darryl Praill: Hey there folks. We're back at it. Another week here on the INSIDE Inside Sales show. How you doing? How you been? How you keeping? It's that time of year. Everything's crazy, end of the year, holidays soon upon us, shopping, commerce, change of the seasons, lots going on. What's keeping you busy? What's keeping you hopping? What's keeping you distracted? Let me ask you that. What's keeping you distracted? Because I don't know about you, but the distractions kill me sometimes. The first thing I do whenever I record a podcast is I put all of my devices on Do Not Disturb. Because if I didn't do that, I don't know if I'd ever be able to finish recording a podcast. Everything's going off, bing, bing, bing, all the time, and sometimes at the end of the day, I find myself going," What the hell did I do?" I set out to do three things today and I might've got one done and I half- assed it. And again, it's all because of the distractions. That's one thing for me to be distracted just because of the nature of my role, I've got a team. So I rely upon them to do their job. But if you are a sales rep, you being distracted is a massive, massive issue because you're all about the activity, doing the research, building out buying committees as you build out your opportunities, trying to grow the deal size, trying to handle objections, trying to create killer proposals, trying to get technical resources within your company to get the answers to the questions you need, trying to outsell the competition. It's tough. There's a lot going on. And I know you know this. This is what you do every day, as do I. But it's interesting from my point of view as CRO because I own more than just sales, as you all know, I own marketing, et cetera. And I always find it interesting to see how one team handles those circumstances versus another team. So I'll give you an example. Normally, I learn a lot from marketing, and sales is a little late to the game for learning, like how to write an email, what stats matter? For example, by the way, pro tip here, open rate on your emails doesn't really matter because that's just a bullshit stat. What matters, do they do something? Is there a conversion, a click through, et cetera? How do you adapt new technology? How do you optimize your processes? How do you inaudible repeatable processes? How do you automate things? Marketing tends to lead the historical innovation on that front and then sales only later catches up. And that's cool, they always need early adopters and then you have main street and then you have the laggards, according to Gartner and their technology adoption lifecycle premise. So what I found interesting was having this conversation the other day about, what does sales do? That marketing is kind of the later adopter. And it was an interesting conversation. And so if I were to stop there, what would you say? What does sales do that marketing has only recently picked up and adopt in the last year or two, maybe three? It's hard to think about it. Maybe you if you're a sales rep you're going to say," Oh, we write, we do killer stuff." And I would argue that you're wrong. That marketing's been doing it for forever. But I did come up with something and hear me out. Sales by definition, I would argue, there's a science behind everything we do. And it's gotten more and more scientific as times come by. Tools, technologies have allowed us to really... Artificial intelligence, machine learning. It's just crazy how things have changed from when we started, which might have been, here's the yellow pages in the phone book and start dialing. Not scientific, so it's changed dramatically. But one thing that even in those days of here's the yellow pages and start dialing to today, what's been consistent that sales has always done, is they've always picked up on, they've always understood the intent, buyer intent. In other words, if a buyer comes to you and says," Tell me about your product", that means they probably have a problem, a pain, and they intend on fixing it. And you might be the solution. If a buyer says," What's your price?" that means they may intend on buying it. And I'm using some drop- dead simple examples. But if I go back, if a buyer stops by your booth at a trade show versus walking by all the other booths, that means they may intend to do something with you and what your messaging says on your graphics that resonates with them. The timeline is completely different. It may not be for a year or six months or two years, or it could just be a pet project. You don't know that, and that's where your sales skills come in. But it's all about by your intent, by your intent. And most of us know this almost intuitively, and what I've learned over sales is timeframe, is that we assume every other sales rep knows it as well. And what is interesting is that the more experience you get in your career, the more your intent vibe, your intent alert goes off. You can see they have a little intent, they have a lot of intent, but it's over time and with experience. Because you're having those conversations, you're watching the behaviors, all that kind of stuff. Now marketing is different. They don't understand intent. They try to understand intent, like most of the time open rate, is not an intent? They open it. Click through, is that an intent? Well, maybe, maybe, maybe. That was about it, that was really about it. They had no idea of intent. So what marketing has started to do in the last couple years through some very innovative technology and organizations and advocates and disciples is really get behind the whole intent band wave. They've picked this up from sales. But like marketing does, they've taken what we do intuitively and they've systemized it with technology and then it becomes part of the nature of cadence and how you react and how you respond, et cetera. And then they start scoring it. Do you have a little intent? Do you have a lot of intent? And then it flows back to the sales reps. So what's interesting about this whole conversation? This whole conversation is, there's a handful of sales reps that truly understand intent. And there's a handful of marketers who truly understand intent. But if we are really realistic with ourselves, most people don't understand intent, honest to God. Or what they do understand is a little misinformed, a little bit simple, a little bit, what's the word I'm looking for here? Let me put it this way. If you don't understand intent, you're doing yourself as a sales rep, a massive disservice about how you can use and leverage intent to dramatically and substantially grow your pipeline and your ultimate deals. How's that? That's the power of intent. So I thought to myself, who knows intent? And the answer was really obvious. So the answer is my good buddy, Christopher Rack. He is the CRO at Demand Science. Now, what's funny about this is I actually reached out to Chris and I said," Dude, can I get you on the show? I want to talk." And he said," Yep, I'm in." And then the next day, honest to God truth, my team comes to me and they said," Here's five people we think we need to get in your show Darryl." Now they rarely do this. I'm a one man show when it comes to this podcast as far as coming up with ideas. That's not true. Daniel, my producer comes up with a lot of content too, but we don't give him that credit because he's behind the scenes. So they came to me with these five names. Number one on the list was Chris Rack. So here's what happened. I said," I've got Chris already booked on the show." And then I shot down the other four and I said," No." That's how good Chris is. So with no further ado, coming at you live Mr. Rack, how you doing today my friend?

Christopher Rack: I'm doing great. No pressure. Thank you. No pressure from that intro. I'm doing really awesome. I do have an answer to your question though. What is something that sales did before marketing?

Darryl Praill: Do it.

Christopher Rack: My answer to that is account- based marketing. I've been on record to saying to people in a joking manner that account- based marketing is what sales has been doing since the beginning of time. Trying to find a specific group of accounts and target them with personalized custom messages, right? So we've been doing it forever, but people just decided to call it ABM. And now it's all the rage.

Darryl Praill: I actually have this conversation on a regular basis. I said in my era, ABM today is what IBM was part of their big resurrection in the'80s and'90s, what they called it at the time Target Account Selling. But to Chris's point, it's been around forever. And I actually hate the term ABM. I would use the term ABX because it's both marketing and selling. To say it's just marketing is bullshit. And a total sidebar, Chris has the best content on LinkedIn. He is always at the top of my feed. And maybe it's just because we're two old guys. Now clearly he's obviously way older than me, although my hair is way whiter than his, don't read into that. I love his content. I stop and comment on his content over and over again. And so you just want to watch two old guys having a secret inside joke, laugh, watch it, but the reality is he delivers a lot of hard truth. So follow him because he is dynamite. So that's on LinkedIn, you can see him, linkedin.com/ in/ christopherrack, is as easy as simple as that. Chris, let's talk to me about intent data. So before we started here, you were in the green room with me and you made an interesting... You just went inaudible. And if I captured this right, because I was typing as fast as I can be because I was so inspired. You said, " Most sales reps, they don't understand intent data." And they're like, " What is it? How can it be used? How sellers use it? How organizations work with it?" And you might have gone on and said other stuff. But my typing speed isn't what it used to be. So let's just start with that since that's where we left off before we went live, talk to me about intent data and hit at home quickly and early on why my audience should even care about this.

Christopher Rack: Got it. So the most common misconception on intent data is that it's identifying customers who are ready to buy, right? Because if you're identifying customers who are ready to buy, you're too late to the game as a sales rep. Most of the time when someone's ready to buy, they've interacted with another vendor for multiple months, they've engaged with content. They've had calls, they've read articles, they've had their problems solved by another vendor and you're usually at that point just really a pricing or negotiation tool. So that's the first and most common misconception with intent. Second is that you have to pay for it. Intent data doesn't necessarily have to be a platform or a solution or a third party data vendor that you have to go out and pay for. Intent is really identifying key triggers that showcase that your ideal customer profile is starting to think about their problem. That is really the definition of intent data. And again, it doesn't have to be purchased somewhere. It could be something as simple as a company hiring a new person in your target job. I sell to a lot of demand generation and marketing decision makers. So anytime a company hires a demand generation buyer, that's a pretty strong intense signal that they're looking to buy my products and services. I didn't have to pay for that data, it's right out there in the open. So you can get a lot of value with intent just by identifying and looking for very simple things that showcase that a company is starting to think about a problem or solution that you solve for. And that's really the two key values coming out of the gate.

Darryl Praill: Okay. So let's make this really simple, Chris. Intent. How would I apply intent in my daily routine?

Christopher Rack: Got it. Your job as a sales rep or a sales professional or a sales leader is to maximize your output. Sellers have been saying this for forever, work smarter, not harder. Everybody's constantly talking on LinkedIn about how dialing for dollars and making a hundred dials a day and all these things are old school and that they don't work. Well, they do, but that's a completely different podcast for a completely different time. But intent is really designed to maximize your resources. Your resources as a sales rep is almost ultimately timed. You only have X amount of time in a day and you can either work a whole lot of overtime, which I know isn't most sellers bag, or you can figure out how to get as much done in the eight- hour window of a day that you possibly can to drive the most conversion. So in its simplest form, intent data is a simple way to prioritize your book of business and focus where you should dedicate your time and your resources. Because in sales now there's two different methodologies. You can automate, Outreach, VanillaSoft, you name it. You can use a software to automate your outbound reach. But with that you sometimes lack personalization. Or you can do ultra personalization and spend 25 minutes crafting an amazingly wonderful email to Darryl Praill that references his LinkedIn profile on his latest podcast. You know that your conversion rates are going to be higher with the personalization, but there's just not enough time to do it. So intent data allows you to focus on the personalization and prioritize who gets the highly customized data, and then who gets the automation, and it's really at its simplest form time management and if you can maximize the amount of output and prioritization you could put into your sales prospecting, you can drive significantly more opportunities, pipeline, revenue, et cetera.

Darryl Praill: So let me tie together and if I've got it wrong or if I have a misperception, you need to bluntly and candidly correct me and call me a moron. And you can do that regardless, just so we're clear on that. So as a sales rep, I'm doing exactly what you said, I'm doing my outreach. Maybe I'm using VanillaSoft or another sales engagement platform. And yes, folks, you need to be hyper personalizing. So for those of you who use products that allow you to automate the email on. Set it and forget it, and you never touch it again until there's a reaction, that's stupid. Don't do it. Your conversion rates will suck. All right. You don't have to be a 25- minute email, it could be a five- minute email, but everything should be personalized. That's your first thing, but you're doing that. And then bing, I get an intense signal that has come in. Now, I'm doing this in real time and I know there's lots of different ways to do it doesn't have to be real time. This goes back to how we began our conversation about distractions. Okay. Do I stop what I'm doing and I say," Oh look, that company who's on my account- based selling list just gave me a signal." Maybe they're on my site. Maybe they did a review on me. Maybe they downloaded a piece of content on a syndicated network. Maybe there's other signals and you can tell us all about them. If that just happened, they're in mode, they're active now, they're researching. They're doing whatever they need to do about a solution that I can fix for them and they're on my hit list. I should pause what I'm doing, my prospecting, and immediately shift and go after them right now because the chances of them responding because it's happening right now are dramatically higher. Is that what you mean or not?

Christopher Rack: I'm speaking more to prioritization of total volume time. There's not a lot of platforms who can give you the real time analytics. A key intent indicator is website visits. So if I'm a sales rep and I got a pop up on my dashboard, Salesforce, whatever that says my target account companies on my website, I'm going to call them right now. That's how I tend to bounce through my day. That's how I flow to be most productive. I know a lot of sellers are very rigid and this is my call block time, this is my email time, whatever works for you works. What I'm saying is that I know that this company X has seven intent signals over the past two weeks. They've opened an email, they've been to my website, they've clicked on a piece of content, they wrote a webinar, et cetera. So I'm going to prioritize 75% of my time today on this company because I know they have the highest proximity to convert to my outbound messaging the old 80- 20 rule. 80% of your bookings are going to come from 20% of your prospects. Intent is about trying to identify the 20%, where you focus 80% of your time, so you can maximize the return on investment.

Darryl Praill: Okay, so this is killer. So reps, this is why we're having this conversation today. I described an example and I love that Chris expanded upon it, which says there was a real time signal, like a website visit. Exactly as he said, I should stop and go and take that because the iron is hot at this moment in time. But what Chris described was an aggregate. There had been numerous intense signals of a variety. Okay. So here's the question, one of the things that we say here at VanillaSoft, I'm not pitching VanillaSoft, it's relevant here. Is we say," We don't give you lists, we serve the next best lead." And there are rules and algorithms and scoring calculations behind the scenes that are determining the next best lead. So that could be part of a cadence or a sequence. Or it could be somebody who just filled out a form, that could be the next best lead. My point being, if I've got an ABM list, let's just use some simple math. Let's say I've got five... I'm an AE or an SDR. I've got five large accounts, those are your whales. I got 40 named accounts, those are probably your ideal customer profiles. And that's what I'm focusing on. So that's 45, I'll round it to 50 for simple math. Let's say there's five people on the buying committee. So for me in VanillaSoft, I go on to talk to the head of sales, the head of marketing, the head of RevOps. I went to talk to maybe the IT person because of security, privacy compliance. And I went to talk to a CFO or CEO who is looking for an ROI in the tech stack, five people. So 50 accounts, five people, that's 250 people. To Chris's point, do I just want to do a rinse and repeat on 250 people all the time? Or do I want to prioritize of those 250 people, here's 25 who have had a massive intent spike over the last period of time. That clearly suggests their in market right now and you should reach out to them right now. And that's the problem with static cadences or like Chris was alluding to earlier, where I'm working my blocks of time on lists and emails and stuff, you're working static cadences. Hey, that's your philosophy if you want to do it. You miss out on the fact that there are more valuable leads and contacts you should be following up with who are in market right now. That's the beauty of intent and that's why you should care. I've had reps Chris come back to me and my team saying," I'm getting all these intent signals. I'm getting all these spike reports, these engagement reports." Why do I care? So if you were to give me that answer. If you heard my rep asking me that question, what's that one sentence or two sentence sound bite that just synopsizes it beautifully that says, this is why you should care.

Christopher Rack: It's really about prioritization of resources to maximize return on personal investment. You care because the time that you're putting it down... I mean I'm going to take it back to, I'm a sales rep at heart. Prospecting sucks. It's the worst part of the job. Trying to identify new opportunities to... No one wants to do it. No one wants to make a hundred calls. No one wants to do volume prospecting. Can that be successful? Yes. You can volume any sales job, I don't care what job it is. But it's not fun, it's miserable and it's quite boring. So intent gives you the opportunity to maximize your prospecting efforts without having to play the volume game, without having to make 200 calls, send 75 emails, automate 1200 responses. It allows you to lay... We make the haystack smaller is what I like to tell my sales reps. Instead of trying to find the needle across 250 prospects, why not try to find the needle across 20 prospects and use data in signals to help make that haystack smaller to start. Because again, you could do it, you can find the needle in the very big haystack, but as a sales rep, it's really pretty miserable. And for the longevity of your career, it's not exactly scalable for a 15- year sales career to be the person who makes 300 dials a day to try to find the sales opportunity. It can be done, but it doesn't mean that it should be.

Darryl Praill: So think about this guys. Why do we tend to automate some of our cadences? Again, don't do that. Why do we use bots? Again, don't do that. We do that because we're trying to work smarter, not harder. Okay. Chris is here telling you intense signals are a much better approach to working smarter, not harder. Because you now know who you should be hyper personalizing. So on the ones that have the high intent or high spike engagement score, maybe those guys get the 25- minute email that you just kill and the rest get the five- minute or two- minute personalization effort, who knows. But you can see that there's a much higher ROI on your time. And candidly, I think as a sales rep, you're going to be way more engaged because you're going to have way more conversations. And that's what you like, now you're selling. You're not that trained monkey just doing rinse and repeat on the activity, you're actually truly selling. And it's all because of the intent signals. Okay. So let's bring it back, Chris. I may or may not have some intent signals capability in my organization that my employer is providing me. If I was to go back to them and say," I want this" or" We need this", how do they approach them? What's the business case? What do they say to start that conversation?

Christopher Rack: If I was to approach my executive team... If I was to approach myself and say," I want intent", I would reach out to my boss and say," Hey, if you buy this, you make me more productive." I can generate more meetings, more opportunities, more pipeline with less activity. It means you have to hire less people." Less people is the biggest of the biggest cost of any organization. Your human power, especially on the sales side of the fence is the most expensive line item. Do you give your executive, your VP, your director, your manager, a path to hiring less people, especially in the competitive market that we work in right now? They would be foolish to ignore that, and that is really the definition of what we've been able to do. In my organization, 70% of the opportunities created come from intent driven accounts. And since we've started using intent layered in our Salesforce instance, I've been able to hire less people, drive my cost of sales up, which allows me to invest in other things. Like tools and technology for my current sales team and more marketing efforts and more products and product growth and operations. So the less money you have to invest in humans, the more you can invest in other things that accelerate your growth path even faster.

Darryl Praill: All right. Clearly we're out of time here folks, but I want to leave you with a path to getting more knowledge. So the reason I asked Chris, beyond him being my favorite guy in LinkedIn, to join us today, is because he is an expert on this topic. Part of that is because if I recall, that's part of what Demand Science does. Is that not true?

Christopher Rack: Correct. That is a significant portion of what we do.

Darryl Praill: So if they want to learn more about Demand Science, they want to learn more about you, they want to continue the conversation with you offline. They want, maybe they... Have you coached them to approach their leadership, to evaluate solutions that could help them sell more effectively with less effort or lack of way of saying it. What's the best way to get a hold of you my friend?

Christopher Rack: Best way to get me is LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn quite a bit. So either DM or respond to one of my comments or via email, chris. racketdemandscience. com. I'm easily accessible, happy to chat with anybody across the sales persona, marketing persona as well too. I'm not biased, I'll talk to anybody. So feel free to reach out anytime.

Darryl Praill: All right. So there you have it. That's Chris Rack, good friend, trusted advisor, and a subject matter expert extraordinaire. Folks, with all sincerity, this needs to be part of your mix. It's part of my mix. We're still fixing it, so it's better and better all the time. There's effort involved. It's not a silver bullet, but it makes life a little bit better so you can work smarter, not harder. The biggest thing I see is that many reps, many of you out there have access to this and you're not taking advantage of it because you're not familiar with it. You don't understand it. So instead of asking for clarity, you ignore it. That's why Chris was here. Don't ignore it, it's not in your best interest. With that, what a time, it's another week in the books. I was looking at the stats the other day for how did we do in 2021 on the podcast, I think you might be happy to know that our reach has grown substantially. We were already a good show, but we grew over 50% in our reach this year. So all of that is because of you spreading the word. I am so grateful, thank you so much. If you do me a favor, continue to spread the word. Let's see if we can't make it 75% in 2022. That's another day in the books for the INSIDE Inside Sales show, my name is Darryl. Have an awesome freaking day. Take care.