The Sales Influencer Series Presents: Brandon Redlinger

Welcome to Episode 21 of the Sales Influencer Series, where Ambition interviews leaders on the cutting edge of sales and marketing.

In today's episode, Ambition's Jeremy Boudinet welcomes PersistIQ Head of Growth and Bridging the Gap: The Ultimate Guide to Account Based Marketing and Selling co-author, Brandon Redlinger, for a special edition of the podcast.

In this episode, Brandon and Jeremy premiere their eBook by counting down their top 5 favorite technologies for account based marketing and selling.

Ep 21. 10 Tools for Account Based Marketing & Selling

Interview Topics

Introductions 0:00 - 3:12.

Synopsis: In this special episode of the Sales Influencer Series, Jeremy and Brandon kick off the launch of a new eBook they published with LeadGenius's William Wickey, Bridging the Gap: The Ultimate Guide to Account Based Marketing and Selling Alignment.

Brandon is the Head of Growth at PersistIQ, a sales technology software that helps teams perform more efficient, effective and targeted outreach. PersistIQ lets you build multi-touchpoint, multi-channel campaigns that sync with all your different sales systems to create a better workflow.

Background on Bridging the Gap. 3:12 - 8:13. (Jump here)

Synopsis: Bridging the Gap just went live this week. The eBook is all about aligning sales, marketing and customer success to drive an effective account based approach to growing revenue.

As the account based model is growing, the playbook is still being defined. Jeremy, Brandon and William felt uniquely positioned to write the eBook because they operate in the thick of the modern day enterprise sales world, both as individuals and as companies.

One thing Brandon sees is that, when companies try to tackle account based sales or marketing, they do so as a one-off campaign or a silo-ed approach. And those campaigns fail, because account based selling and marketing are inherently co-dependent and must align at a foundational level.

What Bridging the Gap seeks to set forth is how to do that. And in the eBook, the goal is not to push tools. Process and strategy come first. The goal of the eBook is to show you how to develop the right process and strategy, then use the tools to succeed.

Prelude: Top 5 Account Based Technologies. 8:13 - 9:23. (Jump here)

Synopsis: The goal of this podcast is to go down the marketing-sales-customer success funnel and pick out personal top 5's in terms of technology that drives the account based sales model at each phase of the funnel.

Brandon and Jeremy each use these tools and will personally vouch for them as technologies that can drive an account based sales model. In the proceeding sections, Jeremy and Brandon set forth and explain their picks.

1. Transparency: Slack & Datanyze. 9:23 - 14:50. (Jump here)

Synopsis: Slack is Jeremy's first pick for a great account based sales tool. The rationale behind this choice is that Slack kills silos and creates effective internal communication channels across marketing, sales, account management and client success.

In order to succeed with an account based approach, teams must kill their silos. And Slack is a perfect tool for doing so, particularly as more Slackbots like Troops can link it to other systems like Salesforce.

Datanyze is Brandon's first pick for a great account based sales tool. Brandon is a huge fan of Datanyze's ability to turn prospect intelligence into something actionable. The foundation of the product is technology tracking - which lets you see what existing technologies a prospect is using.

They also offer predictive analytics that score your existing pipeline and help you break into new accounts. They also help you choose the right accounts to target and find the right prospects to target. Finally, they enrich the data you have on each of your contacts and help you build out your organizational map.

2. Marketing Automation: Pardot & HubSpot. 14:50 - 21:35. (Jump here)

Synopsis: Pardot is Jeremy's marketing automation platform of choice for account based marketing. It gives great insight into who is coming to the site, what they're looking at, how much Ambition has penetrated into an account and so forth.

There are tons of very actionable insights from Pardot. All the intelligence it gives lives inside of Salesforce as well that can tell you whether a company is a good fit, going warm or cold and let sales know likewise.

Brandon chose Pardot's competitor, HubSpot. As it pertains to the account based approach, HubSpot helps PersistIQ leverage inbound marketing to create an account based sales approach, using intelligence about what the prospect is viewing, and so forth.

You can also create tailored nurture campaigns using "If-Then" statements to create an email cadence that nurtures prospects continuously. HubSpot has additional functionality like progressive forms, direct CRM integration and lead scoring.

3. Sales Enablement: Docurated & AdRoll. 21:35 - 27:05. (Jump here)

Synopsis: Jeremy's sales enablement tool of choice is Docurated, which lets you curate and organize all your relevant content for your marketing and sales teams to easily access.

From an account based marketing and selling standpoint, Docurated is a great way to ensure that you leverage all your content most efficiently and that it's easy to find.

Brandon's platform of choice is AdRoll, which is a retargeting technology that lets you get digital ads for your product in front of a specific account - even people who have never visited your site.

You can create specific eBooks and landing pages that ties to each account and speaks directly to them. Or, you can put very top-of-funnel content out there built to drive awareness and just bring them to your site. It's a great way to warm up your prospects in a sneaky way. They also have a solid list of integrations.

4. Sales Outreach: Crystal & Charlie. 27:05 - 32:35. (Jump here)

Synopsis: Jeremy's fourth tool is Crystal, an incredible new tool that gives amazing intelligence on what type of person your prospect is: how to communicate with them, how they write emails, their DISC profile, and so forth.

CrystalKnows is free, integrates into your Gmail account and has been validated by tons of sales reps who've begun using it to do cold outreach.

Brandon's tool is very similar to Crystal, but offers more insight on an account-level: Charlie. Charlie is great for pre-meeting intelligence on both the prospect and the account. It aggregates their most recent activity and sends it to you via email in the 24 hours before your meeting begins.

CharlieApp integrates with your Gmail and uses the latest social media and news updates to let you know the most relevant information going into your meeting. Like CrystalKnows, CharlieApp is also free.

5. Client Success: Intercom & Front. 32:35 - 37:58. (Jump here)

Synopsis: Jeremy and Brandon both chose tools that give great intelligence on your current clients while letting your sales and marketing teams access them just as easily as your client success engineers.

Jeremy's tool is Intercom. Ambition switched from ZenDesk to Intercom a few months ago and are huge fans of the transparency it gives customer communication in our client success channels.

It integrates directly with Ambition's Slack Channel so that sales and marketing can easily jump in and see how accounts are doing and use those insights to inform future marketing and sales efforts.

Brandon's tool is Front. PersistIQ uses Front on top of Intercom to simplify and streamline client communications even more. Front is extremely well-designed and is the most simple interface for client communication on the planet. It's incredibly simple to use, which is key for non-client success engineers in sales and marketing who can find insights simply and easily.

Front is also a great way to collaborate and organization communication across your team, so that when a client issue comes in, you can tag it and route it to the appropriate person automatically, then build workflows off of that, which brings your response time down and gives you insight into the behaviors of your accounts, complete with analytics on use, behavior and so forth.

8. Signing Off. 37:58 - 39:58. (Jump here)

Synopsis: You can find more great tools for account based marketing and selling, broken down by company size, budget and use case in our eBook, Bridging the Gap: The Ultimate Guide to Account Based Marketing and Selling.

Brandon encourages those with questions to reach him at brandon@persistiq.com and wants to reiterate: There's no inherent value in the technology itself.

All sales and marketing technology should be designed to support the critical activities and strategic processes your team has laid out. Building your stack should always start with mapping out your formal selling process.

The Sales Influencer Series Library

To check out further episodes and see why CloserIQ has ranked the Sales Influencer Series as one of the very best sales podcasts of 2016, just click on the links below.

Episode 1. John Barrows

Episode 2. Lori Richardson

Episode 3. Max Altschuler

Episode 4. Matt Heinz

Episode 5. Mark Leslie

Episode 6. Kyle Porter

Episode 7. Jon Bradford

Episode 8. Eks Anderson

Episode 9. Matt Hottle

Episode 10. Heather Morgan

Episode 11. Ilan Ferdman

Episode 12. Ryan Jenkins