Closed Won: How does Salesloft fit into your Tech Stack?

Hi, everyone. Thank you all so much for joining us today. I'm sure some folks are still getting settled in. So, but I just wanted to welcome you all to, we're gonna talk today about how does SalesLoft fit into your tech stack.

It's really a discussion around technical architecture, and there's a lot of good information that you're gonna take away. And I'm really just going to get things kicked off before I, pass the, you know, virtual mic over to, the real host of today, Heather.

So, let's just cover on the next slide, we're gonna see some learning objectives that are gonna help us understand what exactly, we are wanting you to take away from this session today. Heather, would you mind going to the next slide really quick?

Awesome. Thank you so much. So, couple of things that, we're hoping that you take away today. So, knowing the difference between marketing automation and tools like SalesLoft, which, you may know as sales engagement. The new lingo is revenue orchestration, but, just really understanding the difference because we often find that people can sometimes, get these either confused or use them in ways that they're not supposed to or, intended to, I guess, is the better way to say that.

Also knowing when the best time to use a sales engagement tool during your sales cycle is, understanding how sales engagement fits into your overall software plan. You know, we often refer to this as your tech stack.

And finally, identifying the best use cases for sales engagement. Tools like SalesLoft are not a one size fits all, and so there's a lot of different ways that you can use it, a lot of different, teams and different types of sellers. So, we'll really dig into some of those use cases today.

Next slide, Heather.

Alright. One more thing really for me before I kick it over to Heather is, this session is live and a great opportunity to ask questions that you either had coming into this session, which, you know, drove you to attend and join us today.

Or maybe a lot of insights are going to spark up a question for you today that you might wanna ask Heather before, before she lets us go at the end. And so the best way to ask questions in this, landing page is gonna be on the right side of your screen, you're gonna see a question box, that says q and a. And so you can submit your questions, anonymously or with your name, whatever you prefer.

And I will be, really just in the background, you know, checking for any questions that you have.

And then anything that comes up after today, we also host daily office hours, which you can check out on the events page of our website.

And, I think that's really it. So, next slide, I'm gonna just quickly I guess it's good to know who I am, as I've been talking to you for five minutes.

My name is Mimi. I am here at SalesLoft. I oversee all of our customer programs, and, that includes our webinars, being really involved in our new champions hub. If you haven't checked that out, please do. It is an awesome experience for you to understand, you know, how SalesLoft works, what our best practices are, and also get involved with other like minded individuals in our community, which we call discussions.

And so I'm here to really just support Heather. She is the master mind behind the content today. I think you guys are gonna really enjoy what she has to say. So without further ado, Heather, I'm gonna bring you onto the stage, and I'm actually going to to see myself out in just a moment. So take it away, Heather.

Perfect. Thank you so much, Mimi. I appreciate the introduction.

So hi, everyone. My name is Heather Davis Lam. I am founder and CEO of RevenueOps LLC, and we're a sales ops certified partner. Personally, I have an MBA and a MS of marketing as well as multiple certifications across various sales and marketing platforms including SalesLoft.

And so I'm here today to talk to you, more about how does this sales engagement piece fit into your technical infrastructure, when can you use it. And I I'm very excited about this topic because it's something that I could talk a lot about every day. So I wanna tell you a little bit more about, my company first. So RevenueOps LLC, as I mentioned, we're a sales ops certified partner.

We do things like offer strategic consulting and manage services and implementation services for folks who end up, purchasing sales engagement software, and you try to fit that into your tech stack. We also help people by allowing them to, optimize their existing systems. We help you build new system. And, basically, if you have an idea about what you wanna have, we're here to help you make that idea turn into reality.

So we offer lots of full stack services, and if you ever need to migrate platforms or add new things into your system, I'd love to talk to you. So feel free to visit our website at revenue ops l l c dot com. So now to get into the meat and bones of what we're talking about today, the first thing I wanna discuss has to do with marketing automation versus sales engagement. Because I would say as a, as a consultant, I get a lot of questions where people are like, I don't understand what the difference is between a marketing automation platform and a sales engagement platform.

You both send emails. Right? Well, that's, yes, that's true. There's definitely emails that are sent from both platforms, but there's a difference in the type of communications that you're trying to send and what you're trying to get out of those communications when you send them.

So one of the items that I wanna touch on is really what distinguishes the two. Like, what makes the difference between a marketing automation platform and sales engagement? So I'm gonna start with marketing automation platforms.

And marketing automation platforms literally do just that. They automate marketing activities. So when you're trying to do things like send a mass email to people, like, maybe send a company newsletter, or you're trying to tell people about an event that you have coming up, then a lot of times you're gonna send those types of communications out from a marketing automation platform so that you can reach mass people and you can prompt them to take action, like register for a webinar or download a white paper or things of that sort. So it's designed to have some level of personable pieces to it and that you can say, like, hi, first name, or hi, you know, Susie Q. I would love to tell you about this white paper that I have or this event that I have going on. And you can send that out via the emails that you're sending through the marketing automation platform.

That is a little bit different than sales engagement. When I think of sales engagement emails that are going out or sales engagement communications, a lot of times there's multiple different channels that I want to reach folks that I'm trying to engage with from a sales perspective. So I might wanna send them an email, or I might wanna make a social media connect to them, or I might wanna make a phone call to them. And I may wanna do those in a certain sequence, or a certain cadence so that I can understand, what's the best way to communicate with this person in order to have them take that action.

And, usually, that action is a one on one communication with whoever the sales rep happens to be. So it might be me sending an email to someone introducing them about my company, but encouraging them to book a one on one meeting with me, not just sending out a email saying, oh, sign up for a webinar where you're just, like, one of the masses. This is real personalized one on one communications that I'm trying to have with this person. Now from a sales perspective, you might be trying to have those one on one conversations with a lot of different people, and not all of those conversations start at the same time.

Sometimes you might have one person who comes in on a Monday at nine AM and another person who comes in on a Thursday at two PM. And those people are at different places in their communication journey, their one on one communication journey with you. And you need to have the ability to track, is Susie q supposed to receive an email next, or she's supposed to get a phone call? Or am I supposed to send a LinkedIn message over here to Jim Bob?

Like, where are they in the communication cycle? And your sales engagement platform will help you organize that from a sales engagement standpoint so that you as a rep will be able to log in, see where is everybody in their sales journey, in their communication journey, and be able to take the right action at the right time to reach out to them with the right message. And so it really helps you with those one on one communications and being able to stay focused on what is the next, like, message in the series that you need to reach out and talk to this person about.

And so when we do a head to head compares about marketing automation platforms versus sales engagement, again, marketing automation will allow you to send those mass messages.

You can send them via email. You can send out social media messages. You can create paid ad campaigns. But these social media messages that you're sending out, it might be a post on LinkedIn that just, you know, has information about a webinar that you're going to host or an event you're going to be at.

It's not like a one on one direct message to someone in their inbox. It's more mass media. You're expecting multiple people to view this and react or to read the email that you're sending out. You're not expecting a lot of one on one communication to result out of that.

And if someone responds to a message that you've sent out via marketing automation, usually, it'll go to more of a generic email box like a marketing at your company name dot com, where someone from the marketing team will have to reroute that message to the right person to receive the message and be able to take action on it. That's a little bit different than what we have from a sales engagement platform. From a sales engagement platform, you're sending out those messages, and when those responses come back, they're coming back to you because you already are the right person to be responding to those messages that are being sent out on a one on one basis.

And so it allows you to personalize and tailor every interaction that you have with every person, but at the same time, it also allows you to be able to automate certain things. So you can build email templates in your sales engagement platform that will make it so that you don't have to keep typing the same email over and over and over again. Instead, you can put the body of the email in an email template, and maybe you only wanna customize, like, the first couple of sentences to the individual prospect that you're reaching out to.

And you have the ability to do that. You can either put some sort of a snippet in the top of your email template before you hit send, or you might manually type in something that's specific to that person because you talked to them at an event, and you wanted to bring that up again so that they knew, yes, you're communicating with the person. But those one on one communications are a lot different than the mass communications you'd see from a marketing automation platform.

Some of the other things that you'll see that are kind of similar in that, you would have a marketing automation platform has drip campaigns, but these drip campaigns are generally designed to do things like gather more information about you because they don't really know who you are. So maybe the a marketing person might have your email address, but they don't have your first name. So they might create a drip campaign that will encourage you to take action so that you would fill out a form and provide your first name to the marketing team. That's a little bit different than the sales engagement, cadences that would be set up.

Sales engagement cadences are, again, kind of like a formula playbook that your sales team will go through in order to communicate with you. And the goal of each one of these cadences, it's different depending on what the cadence is for. For example, somebody who's a brand new lead who comes in the door, if you have a cadence for a new lead, your goal of the cadence might be to book a meeting with that person. And the goal of the cadence is really to see if you cannot get to the end because you want the person to take the action as quick as possible.

So if you can get them to book a meeting with you in your first email, they don't have to receive the other twenty emails in the series.

And you can just continue on that one on one communication and via the booked meeting that they just booked. So it's a little bit different whereas the marketing cadences are set up so that even though you may take action on one of them, you're likely gonna receive emails that happen after that that'll either be sending additional information or doing other things, unless you take an action that would pull you out of that cadence.

So it's a little bit different.

You'll also see the ROI come through from a sales engagement standpoint and that these communications, because they're so personalized and because you have specific goals for those communications with these folks through these sales engagement cadences, you're going to notice that your deal cycle is going to speed up because people are receiving the right message at the right time. So they're able to take action quicker, which means you're able to get them through the sales cycle quicker. So all of that is a benefit to your sales team and that they're going to be able to work more leads more efficiently, which is going to bring in more money for your business. So, overall, there's a great ROI there that a sales engagement platform will help bring to you.

So I'm gonna pause there for questions and see if there's anything that has come up based on what we've talked about that has gone into the chat. Mimi, anything?

Nothing yet.

Okay. Fantastic. Hopefully, that means you're all with me, and we're following along here, and that's great. And if you do have questions, feel free to put those in the chat. We'll be happy to address them as we come up. My goal is for each one of the little sections that we're going through here, I'll pause at the end of each one of those sections in case a question comes up based on the content that we've been discussing up to this point that you wanna talk about prior to us moving to the next section.

So since we don't have any questions yet, then we're gonna move on to when is the best time to use SalesLoft.

And that's a question that a lot of folks really have a hard time answering. They're like, well, what is SalesLoft gonna help me do? When should I use it? When's the best time to introduce this into my sales cycle?

And so let's talk about what sales engagement and SalesLoft does for your particular business. So the first thing it does is really allows us to increase the speed of time that you can end up communicating with the different leads that are coming in, and it does that by helping your sales rep stay organized. We talked about how your cadences will basically be a playbook of when you're supposed to communicate with certain people at certain times. So when you log in to SalesLoft, you'll see on your dashboard, you have these to do list tasks that you're going to end up going through.

It says send these emails to these people from this cadence. You wanna make this phone call, this step to this person, and this is what you're supposed to be talking about. You wanna send this social media message to this person over here, and it will give you that day by day, step by step, who's due today list of tasks that you need to do so that your reps can prioritize their day and make sure that they are doing the tasks that are gonna help move all of these different people forward in the sales cycle. So it'll allow you to focus your different communications on whether the these folks are inbound or whether you're doing outbound outreach.

And you you can certainly prioritize items by, like, a high priority cadence, a medium cadence, low priority cadence so that you can be sure that you're focusing on those leads that have the highest chance of converting, and that will allow your team to be most effective.

Now the second thing that a sales engagement platform is going to do for you, is you can have your CRM help you take actions automatically. So that's a fantastic feature of having a sales engagement platform tied into your CRM. So if data flows into the CRM and now certain fields are updated, And we can have different automation set up within SalesLoft that can look at that CRM and say, oh, this person now meets this criteria. I wanna put them in this specific cadence because now's the right time to talk to them about this piece of data that was updated in their system. So this is a great way for you to be able to have that response happen automatically.

So the sales engagement platform will look at the CRM, pull that person into a cadence, and you can even have those emails going out automatically so that communication gets started. So it happens as soon as that person takes that action, which is really great because, again, that speeds up the communication time. Because if somebody is thinking about something in particular or if they've taken a certain action, that's the right time to reach out to them. So if we have the system automatically sending those right messages at that right time, the chances of you getting a response and being able to advance the deal cycle is much higher.

So that's definitely a great benefit to this. And then the last piece that's really we've talked about, it has to do with making sure that you have an integrated workflow so that you can create customer value. So part of these cadences that you have set up in your sales engagement platform is to help your sales team organize what's happening and who they need to communicate with. But another piece of these cadences is that you're providing value to these folks that you are reaching out to.

So it's not always us asking for information and asking them to give us things. We're literally giving the prospects and the leads and the, folks that you're reaching out to from a customer success perspective, things of value that they will be able to use and take with them. And by building that value, you're also building trust with your company through this sales engagement platform so that if these prospects trust you more, they're more likely to reach out to you and wanna continue on in the sales process. So it's a great way to differentiate yourself from your competitors and that you're giving them something without necessarily asking for something in return, and that is something that really helps push the deal cycle forward.

So with that, now when should we use SalesLoft?

My answer is throughout your sales process. From the time a lead comes in the door and gets assigned to your sales team, that is a great time to set up an inbound lead cadence. So you can reach out to that person right away. You can encourage them to have those one on one conversations and to set up time to talk with your sales reps.

And so that's a great way to really, get those leads in the door fast and have them moving through your sales cycle. You can also be setting up different cadences for people who say are in the middle of the sales cycle. So if you have folks who are you're looking at an opportunity for and maybe they've had a demo, you could have a post demo cadence, which might provide them additional pieces of content that are frequently requested from folks who see your demos. And you can have that already prebuilt in templates.

And once you've had a demo with somebody, then you can drop that, in the you can drop that to them. So that way, they will have that information already set up, and you don't have to be typing out lots of emails and trying to find all of this content to send out to them later. So then also the great part of having a sales engagement tool is it's not just for presales.

It's also post sale. So when you have customer success teams who are tied into your sales engagement platforms as well, they can be setting up cadences for, say, renewals. So if you have a subscription service and you know that their one year renewal is coming up and is going to be due, you can create a cadence that can put somebody in the renewal cycle, to start those conversations maybe three months prior to the renewal is supposed to happen so that you can make sure that they're prepared and you can understand what your renewals are gonna be looking like. And if there are questions, then you can be addressing that prior to when the renewal comes up.

So you could have cadences for people who are high risk versus cadences for people who are low risk for our renewal. And that will help your customer success team stay on track, make sure that you aren't letting anybody drip through the cracks, and that you're reaching out to everyone in a specific amount of time prior to the renewal with the same messaging and making sure that that's consistent across your team. And that's another great benefit of having a sales engagement tool is that this is about consistency.

If your team members have come up with messages and those messages are really working and and really helping connect with those people that are in your target market, then you wanna share that success with the rest of team so that everyone can be using that messaging that's really working well. It's also an opportunity to bring in members of your marketing team so that your marketing team can ensure that you're using the right language, things are branded appropriately according to what your company guidelines are, and you can make sure that all of the messages that are going out from your company are consistent and professional and have the right messaging that is going to resonate with those people who you're reaching out to.

And so while you're using these different email templates in your cadences, that also gives you an opportunity to be able to measure the effectiveness of those email templates is and, oh, email templates and those cadences as you're using them. So if you find that you have been sending out a cadence and email number four is performing way better than email number two, you might wanna think about maybe switching the order of those emails that you're sending out so that you can get people to respond back to you faster, and you can be more effective in your sales, prospecting that you're doing.

So there's a lot of different benefits to being able to templatize and share what's working with the entire team so that the whole company benefits and you can become as efficient as possible. Because I don't know about you. I hate doing things twice, and I don't wanna have to write an email twice. I'd rather write it just once and then use that as the basis for sending out all of those other communications.

And doing this will also help the process and the experience that folks on the other end are receiving it. So I know I've talked a lot about what's happened from a salesperson's perspective and being able to organize their day and find who they're supposed to be reaching out to. But on the other side of this, we're also looking at this from a consumer standpoint. When you're on the other end and you're receiving email communication, I know that what I hate is getting email communication that isn't relevant to me.

And so if I've told somebody that I'm not interested in their product and they keep sending me five more emails about it, that's not gonna make me wanna reach out to them anymore. In fact, that would make me wanna reach out to that company even less. But if I'm having a a conversation with someone or if I see a question that I have and I know that I can respond to this email and get the person who's gonna be able to answer that question on the email right away, that's gonna help me build trust with this company that's reaching out to me, and that's gonna make it so that I'm going to want to engage with them and go through this purchasing cycle in order to become a client of theirs.

And it's also on the other end, having these cadences and having this templatized and built into a sales engagement platform will allow you to also make sure that the important messages are getting to these clients. So there's nothing worse than reaching out to an enterprise level company and reaching out to a couple of different branches. And then all of a sudden, you look at your inbox, and you've got forty emails from that company in there because multiple different parts of the business haven't realized that they're all sending you email, just based on a couple of requests that you put in.

What's really best is if you're able to prioritize high priority, medium priority, low priority for cadences so that if you reach out to a company about a couple of different things, we can prioritize what we're gonna reach out to you about because we might see that you've inquired about a couple of different products, but, really, there's one thing that you've asked for a demo on. That demo product is likely the one that you're most interested in, and that's what we should be communicating with you about. So these cadences and having them in priority will allow us to prioritize which communications we send out to prospects so that they're not overwhelmed on the other side with receiving too many messages and instead can focus on those messages that mean the most to them.

And then once we're having those one on one conversations, we can start building on and finding out what else they need to have so that we can pull in the relevant people from the business to help put together the solution that's gonna be right for them.

This is also gonna assist us with, sales processes and being able to refine the different strategies that our sales teams are using. So when you're using a sales engagement software, one of the great things is that when you go to onboard a new rep, you're able to share these cadences, which you've already proven out to work with the right messaging that's for your company, already is built in. So all you have to do is train your team members on how to be able to utilize the sales engagement software properly. And you're gonna have to train them obviously on your particular business and the ins and outs so that they can have those relevant conversations.

But this will help them ramp up faster because you've already made it so that the key important emails and the key sequences and the key, you know, cadences for doing those specific outreaches that you've proven to work are already built into their workflow so that they're gonna be able to scale up their their processes and procedures and become embedded in your sales team faster. So that's gonna make it so that whenever you hire someone in, your ramp time is gonna be decreased, which is always a good thing because the sooner you can get a rep on the phone and the sooner you can get them selling, then the better it is for your business and the more ROI you can bring in by hiring that new person.

So we'll also be able to gather different engagement metrics and data around what's working and what's not, and how many activities are certain people taking versus others. So we'll be able to tell if somebody having more one on one conversations and closing more deals, or is it more cadence based than what you have templatized is actually helping people move through the sales cycle? You'll be able to see, like, what's working and what's not so that you can use that for appropriate coaching with your sales team and help them weed out the items and the activities that are not doing, certain things to move the sales cycle forward and instead help them to focus on what's been proven to work.

So that's where that data is super important.

So long and short, when do we use SalesLoft?

Top to bottom on the sales process. There's lots of different cadences that you can set up for the different areas that you're trying to focus on.

With that, I wanna pause for questions before we go on to our next section. Were there any questions that came up around the when to use SalesLoft and when's the best time?

I'm gonna assume no news is good news. So I will keep moving. I'm just checking the the chat real fast, and I see, yes, we will be sharing the slide deck. So that's great.

So next, a section that we want to work on is sales engagement fit in your software plan. And this is where that architecture discussion really kinda gets into the meat and bones of it. So first thing I wanna do is I wanna talk a bit about, like, what does a revenue workflow platform look like? So sales engagement.

And there's a lot of different pieces to this. So there are different, customers that are involved. So you have the people component. You have different signals that they're giving you based on whether they're on your website right now or whether they've, you know, clicked on a link in an email or whether they've opened something. We have different metrics around, like, what's your current pipeline look like, and are customers happy with the communications that they're getting? And are they renewing their contracts?

What's their rep performance looking like? Are they closing more deals? Are they consistent around meeting their quotas? And what you know, how does this compare against what their quotas are?

So the revenue, workflow platform and sales engagement tool will help you be able to see all sorts of things. So both from the rep standpoint, they'll be able to organize their day, see the prospects that they're working with. They'll be able to understand are these prospects receptive to the messages that they're getting. So when you make a phone call, was the did the phone call go well?

What was the disposition? What was the sentiment? So did they pick up the phone, and were they happy that you called them? Or did they pick up the phone and say, I'd rather not speak to you?

Well, that's important information to be able to gather, and it's great to have a sales engagement tool, have a pop up window where you can just select those couple of things as they happen and be able to write that back to your CRM so you can see your activities and what's working and what's not. And it's fantastic to be able to organize your day from a rep standpoint.

From a sales leader standpoint, it's great to have an overview and a look at what is your team doing so that you can be sure that your reps are focusing on those activities that are going to bring in the most revenue and that are going to help drive the business forward.

And the way you really need to do that is you can look at the different metrics that are in the org. You can see which activities are working. Are there reps that are skipping steps and cadences that you need to be aware of?

When it comes to phone calls, are there certain reps who are more successful, than other reps? And if so, on those phone calls, what's the differentiator?

Is it because the successful reps are talking less and listening more, or is it because they're speaking about a specific, topic that maybe the less successful reps are not speaking about? That would be great to understand those different keywords, what works, and what doesn't so that you can coach your team towards excellence in all respects. What's also great is when you have recorded phone calls, if you have an example of some great calls, then it's great to share those great calls with the entire team saying I would love for you to listen to this call. Let's let's dissect it, and let's talk about what worked in this call that made this such a fantastic call.

And let's see if we can replicate those key pieces of information that came up and that we learned from this call in all of our other calls so that we can all have all of our calls be just as successful. And so having those tools where you can do a retrospective, look back on what activities have taken place, what type of messaging was resonating with your prospects and your clients, what type of activities were driving those reps towards close versus not. That's all information that as a sales leader, I wanna know about what's happening within my tech stack from my team. And being able to look at those metrics and pull them into my CRM where I have maybe a large dashboard that I'm looking at from a sales manager perspective, I can see all my activities.

I can see my reps. I can see who's got certain, things that are moving towards close. I'll be able to tie that back to my sales engagement platform where I can also get all of these metrics, be able to coach, and also be able to jump in when needed. So if I have a rep who says, hey.

I really need you on this call right now. Can you hop on? Like, you can have ping them and have them hop on the call and assist you with that. So there's a lot of different things that you can do with a sales engagement platform to really help drive those deals towards success.

Now the big question is, where does this fit in the tech stack? I've talked about a couple of different types of things. And so what I have is a very basic, architecture diagram that kind of shows where some of these different tools will fit together. Now I will say that there's usually a lot of other items that are bolted on to these, like, a lot of other outside integrations that we would see. You might have, depending on the size of your company, a lot more text pieces that are added in. So you might have an integration level and or layer onto this, and you might have, all sorts of other pieces of information.

But I wanna talk about these kind of core, pieces of technology and kind of how they work together. So your marketing automation platform, again, we talked about how this is more automated mass emails. You have marketing SMSs, which are like those blasts that you might get from, like, companies saying, hey. We've got a sale today.

Check out our website and go take fifteen percent off. Like, those are the types of marketing SMSs that you would receive from a marketing automation platform. And a lot of times, your marketing automation platform is also tied to your website. So web leads would feed into the marketing automation platform.

The data from the marketing automation platform will feed into the CRM.

Once the marketing team feels that, yes, this is really great, and we think it needs to go to sales so that they can follow-up. And then when it goes to the CRM, those CRM records have information, usually about the leads. It'll have information about the companies. It'll have information about the different opportunities or deals that you're running and the amounts, and you can create quotes.

There's all sorts of different pieces that the CRM will be able to do. But once it hits the CRM, this is when we can set up automations to automatically pull those leads into your sales engagement platform and set them up so that they can be put in a cadence. So, for example, you might have a cadence for someone who is a brand new lead. So someone fills out a lead on the website.

It goes into the marketing automation platform. It gets assigned to a sales team member in the CRM and pushed to SalesLoft where then we have a cadence that automatically sends out an email saying, hey. So glad that you're interested in our product. I'd love to book some time with you today so that we can talk about, you know, how I can help you best meet your needs.

Here's a a link to my booking calendar, and you can click on this link, and they're able to click on the link, choose a time that works best for them, which automatically sends them out a calendar invite, and then it appears on your calendar, and you know you have a meeting for today. So all of that can happen within the space of just a couple of minutes while this is fresh on the mind of the person who's visiting your website about them wanting to talk to somebody. Now they have an email from you individually reaching out to them, and they've had the opportunity to book a time that works for them on their calendar.

And now you have a mutual meeting set up to where you can progress things in the sales cycle. And you didn't have to manually look at the marketing automation platform for that to happen. You didn't have to manually type things into the CRM for that to happen. All of the data just flowed from system to system so that it put the person in the right place at the right time to get the right message.

And what you can do is when, say, somebody responds to something in your cadence, like, maybe you've sent out three emails and made two phone calls from your cadence, and now somebody has booked a meeting. You might have an automation that says, great. This person booked a meeting. I no longer need to have them in this cadence. So take them out of the cadence because I'm continuing a one on one conversation with them until they reach another part of my deal cycle, in which case I might put them into, like, a post demo cadence. And so you can set up the cadences that make the most sense for your business and that make the most sense for communicating with these folks, and you can build that into your your tech stack. And you can have the fact that they're in a certain cadence or out of a certain cadence come from SalesLoft into the CRM so that we can easily report on this on reports and dashboards.

We can see in reports and dashboards, say, in Salesforce, which cadences are being used the most by reps and which ones are the most effective, which, emails are are working. And we're able to see how many activities that folks are from a sales perspective are taking per day with the different prospects in order to try to move the different deals forward. And, really, it's it's like a math game. Right?

You have a certain number of leads that are kinda come in the door. A certain number of those leads, a percentage of them will hopefully convert to deals, and a certain percentage of those deals are gonna convert into close one opportunities that will need follow-up from post sale. And, you know, if you just do out the math, the more people you can get in the door and the more of those conversations you can be having with relevant people at the beginning of the sales cycle, then the more deals you're gonna be able to close at the end of it. And so when it comes to your tech stack, we do have a lot of these things.

It's kind of like a hub and spoke where your CRM is your of your wheel and your marketing automation platforms spoke, your sales law platforms spoke. Then you might also have, like, like, a commerce platform for when something say goes closed one and you've gotta send invoices. They can send that information to the commerce platform. Some companies also have commerce talking to marketing automation platform.

So if somebody abandoned the cart and never ends up buying something, they drop them into a marketing cadence that will try to get them to push towards, you know, going back into their cart and making a a a sale. But it depends on whether you're doing, like, b to b sales or b to c sales as to whether that's gonna be connected or not. But you can also have lots of other integrations that are on the outside of all of these other platforms. For example, like, for SalesLoft, you might have a integration with, say, a video platform.

Because in your cadences, you want to, have your sales reps record a, you know, fifteen second video that you're gonna drop into an email that goes out to somebody as part of a cadence. Like, maybe you found that's been effective.

So there's a lot of different integrations that are out there with platforms that integrate with your SalesLoft instance to help your reps be more effective in their sales process that you can incorporate into your cadences. And so you might have additional items that'll kind of, you know, come off of your sales off platform, like a spoke off of this being a hub as well.

Any questions? I know we've talked a lot about some technical pieces.

Any questions about how does this architecture set up before we start talking about some use cases?

Alright. I'm gonna continue on then. Let's talk about some use cases. So we will talk about when's the best time, when should we be utilizing a sales engagement platform, What are some, like, real time, use cases?

I know we've talked about a couple of them so far. We talked a little bit about inbound leads. And so we can say there might be a field on a lead or a contact record that if that field changes, then we wanna add somebody into a specific cadence. So if it's maybe an inbound lead and that inbound lead is in a certain lead stage and they meet other certain criteria, then drop them into one cadence.

But if they are inbound and they've inquired about another certain product, then maybe we wanna drop them into a different cadence. So we can map over those fields from the CRM to the sales engagement platform, and that's gonna allow us to pull in that data. So when the changes happen in the CRM and that data is pushed to those different fields, that we can have that automation rule say, yes. Now this person meets the criteria.

Let's go have them do this. And that makes it so that you don't have to have a rep looking back and forth between different platforms and trying to figure out who needs to go where. Like, let the system take care of that. If it's repeatable, then we can likely automate it so that your reps don't have to do any of that manual work.

And that's gonna save their time because in general, we wanna have the rep spending as little time doing manual tasks as possible and instead have them focusing their time on trying to sell things. And so the more we can get them on the phone, the more we can get them in one on one conversations with people, then the more likely we can have them driving those deals to close. So whatever we can do to get them out of the manual day to day, let's just check out a field on a a CRM record. Great.

Let's see if we can automate that and put that on the system to take care of that for them.

Now another one that we haven't discussed yet happens to be nurture cadences.

So there might be a couple of different use cases in regards to nurture cadences.

The first one would be, like, say you've done an outbound cadence, and you've sent twenty emails and made a number of different phone calls, and you've done, you know, social media connects, and you weren't really getting any engagement from this person. They never wrote you back. But, yeah, you know this person is really in your target market and potentially could be a good fit for what you're trying to talk to them about. We may instead wanna move them to a nurture cadence because now might just not be the right time for them to talk to you, which might be why they haven't written you back. Maybe they know they don't have budget, but they haven't told you that because you haven't had those communications.

Instead, what you can do is you can drop them into a nurture cadence where it's going to be a little bit of a less aggressive outreach, but it's going to keep you top of mind. So maybe now might not be the right time for them to talk to you about a sales engagement platform, but maybe a year from now would be. And if you've kept them in a nurture cadence where you're sending them regular updates and just kinda giving them information and keeping them, you know, having them keep you top of mind, but yet at the same time still telling them, hey. Whenever you're ready, why don't you reach out to us, and here's how you can do that. Then when the time is right for them, they're going to take that action, and they're gonna reach out to you. And so it just helps them remember who you are, keep you top of mind so that you're the first person that they reach out to.

Sometimes we can also have nurture cadences where, you know, maybe you're in the middle of a sales cycle, and then you find out you're having conversations with this person, and the bomb drops up. We just lost our funding for this year. We can't have this conversation right now, but I want you to call me in a year. You can put them in a nurture cadence to, again, keep you top of mind.

You can also set, different tasks so that you know to reach out to them in whatever length of time that they told you to reach out, and you can put them into different cadences for that. So there's a lot of different ways where you can automate that outreach so that you don't forget about these people later on when you need to reach back out to them in a certain length of time. So having those nurture cadences is great because it helps you with that automation and that messaging and having it consistently go out on a regular basis. And then also those tasks that you set can help you remember to reach out to them at the right time.

Another great thing for sales engagement is it can help you with keeping a lot of your data clean without having to have your reps going in and changing fields all the time. A great example of that would be, like, say an account stage changes, and you now went from being a prospect account to a client account. And you wanna have all of the people who are under that account marked as a client as well.

When the account stage changes, you can automate it so that the system will automatically go and change the account the stage for all of those people who are underneath that particular account, all of those contacts.

And that's something that you can set up an automation rule to do for you. So it certainly makes it easy so that you're not, say, reaching out to somebody like their company is a prospect when their company has actually converted and become a client. Because, again, this platform is all about sending the right message at the right time to the right people, And you don't wanna be sending prospect messages to somebody who is a client because they're just gonna be reading these messages going, I don't know why you're trying to sell me something. I am a client already. Like, I've already bought your things.

And so that's that's not the way to continue to build trust with your company. The best way to build trust is, oh, send a message once they become a client. You might have a new cadence that says, oh, you know, welcome to, you know, our our ecosystem. We're so happy to have you as a client.

Here are some new client resources that can help you get the most out of our platform, or whatever you happen to be selling at the time. And so there's different things that you can do in order to help automate all that, and part of that would be making sure your database data is clean. Now it's much more effective to have the system do those updates than it is to have a sales rep going into each one of these contact records and making the updates on the stage for each one of those contacts. Like, that's not a good use of their time.

They're not gonna be bringing a lot of value to the company by wasting their time doing those manual updates. Let's let the system take care of that for you.

Another one that's a great one is, again, if a opportunity, say, goes to closed one, that's fantastic. Like, they're a customer. Let's mark everybody else as a customer. So, again, they're not listed as being a prospect any longer.

You know, they're now all customers that are in your org. You can also do the same thing too if, say, for example, you have a client and your account now maybe they didn't renew for some reason. So you're now marked as churned. You could always mark the people under that account also as being churned and put them directly into one of those nurture cadences that you've set up. Because maybe now wasn't the right time for them to continue being your client, but that doesn't mean that they won't become your client again in the future. And so if you begin to nurture them, if you start talking to them about new features that are coming out with your platform and all of the upgrades that you've made over the course of the time from when they stop their subscription to when they wanna start again, well, that's great. Now, hopefully, you can win them back as a client, and you can bring them back into your ecosystem.

Now one other item that we have in here has to do with dispositions and sentiments.

So when a call is logged, say, with a certain disposition or sentiment, we can update their person's stage. So, for example, if we have a disposition and a sentiment, and I'm just gonna put this back in the slideshow. I don't know why it changed on us.

When we have a call that is logged with a certain disposition or sentiment, say you you've called someone and you spoke to them, and they're not happy with the fact that you called them because they don't think it's the right time for you to be speaking about this particular product to them. That's important information to have. And so you wanna log those dispositions and sentiments so that you can make sure that any future communications that you send out to that person are relevant to them if future communications need to go out. Like, for example, maybe you reach out to somebody and they're super happy about the messaging that you've had with them, and they wanna continue and they want to, like, book a new meeting with you.

Great. That's important information to have. Put that information down and mark that in your database so that you can pull reports in on those different things that are happening and create dashboards so that you can see what was the disposition and what was the sentiment, of these different calls that were taking place so that you can make sure that the people are logged from their person stage standpoint. And if they they tell you on the phone, now is not the right time to have this conversation, then you can change their sentiment.

Say that now is not the right time, and then that will change their person stage. So that might pull them out of a certain cadence and maybe put them into a nurture cadence instead. So you can have all of these things happening automatically just by, having the system do the updates for you.

And then let's see here. So then I think the summary I wanna make sure I know we're coming on time, and I wanna be respectful of that. So the big question, that we have is, like, what have we learned today and key takeaways.

And so some of the key takeaways we have, marketing automation is great for mass communications.

It's sales engagement is great for those one on one communications and helps you really personalize and have those personal conversations with those people who you need to talk to.

Sales engagement should be used throughout your sales process from the moment somebody gets assigned to the sales team through post sale. So whether they're somebody who you're they're an active prospect, if there's somebody who needs to be nurtured, if there's somebody who you're working through a deal or opportunity with, if there's somebody who you're working on renewals with, all of this information, can be built into various different cadences with different goals on them. And you can just make sure that the right person is put into the right cadence so they're getting the right messaging at the right time.

Another key piece of information is that your sales engagement software works closely with your CRM. We do have integrations with the CRM where you're mapping the different fields, and you're able to, utilize the sales and marketing software together to provide a good experience to those prospects and clients that are coming in the door so that they're getting those right messages at the right time, whether it be via social media or via via email or phone calls or whatever happens to be there. And then last but not least, the sales engagement activity, if it happens repeatedly, then let's talk about automating it.

Because if we can create an automation rule or if we can update a field based on certain activities or things that have taken place, then that's gonna make it so that your sales team members don't have to worry about manually updating your systems. All your systems are gonna stay in sync, and these people are gonna be getting the appropriate messages at the right time because the system's gonna automatically update it based on what's happened with them. So this is all good information to have. Now I do wanna point out at the bottom of a lot of these slides, and we will be sending in the slide deck, there's also some links to some, great SalesLoft articles that are on their blog, which has additional information around a lot of the topics that we've talked about today.

So I highly encourage you to check out those articles and dive a little bit deeper into a lot of these items that we've talked about today. And I wanna pause here because I know I've kinda covered quite a bit. Do we have any questions so far?

I have a question, Heather.

Sure.

Go for it.

So tons of great information today and, a lot that you would be able to probably speak more about than maybe some of our, you know, people our lofters who host our office hours. So, if anyone had any questions after the fact, what is the best way to reach you? Do you prefer LinkedIn, email, either one? What works for you?

That is a great question. So you can reach out to me directly at heather at revenue ops l l c dot com, or you can visit our website. Again, we have the link at the beginning of our slide deck. That's revenue ops l l c dot com. There's a form right there. If you, fill out that form, then I will be in touch with you right away.

Awesome.

I don't see any other questions in the chat, but, you know, please feel free to submit them. We have just a couple minutes left, but we can hang around if any questions come to mind.

Fantastic. And then just as a couple last couple of notes here. So I've talked a lot about SalesLoft today because, you know, top performing teams, they trust SalesLoft. And I have been in this space, in the sales and marketing space for way longer than I wanna admit, and I wanna say that this has been just a fantastic software that has really been a game changer in the industry.

And so I highly encourage you to look into SalesLoft further. Look at how it can help you personalize and how it can help you build things at scale so that you can have your sales team being more effective, able to reach out to more people by doing less work, because we wanna make this as easy as possible. It really does help you automate that one on one communication and helps you move that conversation from what might have been automated emails or phone calls that were happening to those one on one communications that are really gonna help drive your sales cycle forward. And then the most important part, at least for most of the sales managers that I talked to, is it drives those higher close rates.

Because, again, if we can be more effective with the prospects that we're working with that are in our pipeline, and we can work more prospects, then just by simple math, it's gonna help you drive those higher close rates, and it's gonna help you drive and close more business in general because you're gonna be having those correct communications and the correct conversations at the right time, which is gonna drive those close rates through the roof. So I highly encourage you to look into that a little further. And if you wanna reach out, there both Mimi and I can, have those lovely conversations with you around how SalesLoft can help.

And then with that, I wanna say thank you to everyone. I know that we've, you know, spent the hour together, so I hope that you learned a lot from this webinar. It's been my pleasure to really speak to you about a passion.

You know, this is a passion subject for me, and I would love to continue the conversation. So thank you all, and I really appreciate your time today.