All in Favor Say, “Alyce!”

By Mary Matton on February 10, 2021

For the 4th post in our series, “Alyce 360,” Director of Demand Generation Nina Butler shares the three key questions for marketers to consider to get a sales organization fired up when they adopt marketing technology. 

As a demand gen marketer, I spend a lot of time strategizing how to drive meaningful brand awareness, create inbound opportunities, support sales enablement, and influence customer retention and consequently, some time vetting new technologies that may be able to give our organization the shot in the arm it needs to jumpstart our efforts in a particular area.

For technologies that are marketing sponsored but sales executed, it can be difficult navigating the implementation and adoption waters with your friends across the aisle.

In this post, I will share how I’ve observed other marketing leaders drive excitement and adoption for Alyce within their sales organization (because hey, my experience is moot – our sales team already knows the power of Alyce!).

When Should I Loop In Sales?

This is actually a trick question. Getting sales buy-in during the purchase process is undoubtedly key to Alyce’s long term success within an organization. But even more important than when sales gets brought into a purchasing conversation is actually how systemically aligned your marketing and sales teams are. 

How often do you meet with sales?

What is the focus of those conversations?

Are your sales counterparts trusted advisors to you?

Are you seen as a strategic partner to them?

How is your historic track record of delivering campaigns and purchases that positively impact their bottom line?

Thinking through questions like this will help you gauge your alignment IQ. Fortunately, although no one tool can bring a sales and marketing team closer together, we have observed Alyce inherently promoting unification across marketing and sales teams.

In addition to doing an alignment gut check, you will also want to evaluate how easily new technology gets adopted by your sales organization. Is it usually an uphill battle or are they early adopters, the first to be at the forefront of innovative ways to approach modern-day selling? If it’s the former, bringing them into the conversations earlier is ideal.

Finally, make sure you agree with sales on the end goals of this technology. Are you both going to evaluating the success of the tool in the same way? If not, the road will be rocky and the hill will be steep.

How Do I Drive Excitement for Alyce?

In our experience, marketing teams that believe at their core in our vision, to better enable people to buy from people, innately drive more excitement within their company for Alyce.

Having Alyce be a part of your onboarding culture, especially for any new sales rep classes that join, will also ensure it remains top of mind and exciting for your organization to use. Day 1 tutorial: you have LinkedIn, you have your phone, you have your email and you have Alyce. Boom.

Finally, as with any new thing you are trying to rally around, it’s all about identifying your power users or beta group members and leveraging their success to evangelize the concept to others. After a few team members start to see results and have a leg up on their colleagues, it’ll catch on like wildfire and the excitement will be contagious.

Will They Adopt Technology?

Of all the influencing factors that help drive adoption, the biggest is how tightly aligned the sales and marketing teams are. Weird…. Didn’t we just talk about this? Yes. Yes, we did. And we’ll never stop mentioning it. While adoption will always be highest in organizations that have tight alignment between their sales and marketing functions, there are several other ways marketing champions can help drive adoption for Alyce within the sales organization:

1. Develop spiffs that incentivize the reps toward a specific outcome. We usually see customers have one in place around the volume of Alyce gift invites sent over a certain time period. Anything performance-based as it relates to your specific goals with Alyce (i.e. meetings booked or pipeline influenced) should be driven by the sales managers supporting the BDR/SDR teams.
2. Share the love! Create video shout outs for high performing reps – reps GRIND on the daily to get conversations opened and new business closed, and when Alyce helps them achieve that and marketing celebrates it, it’s a feel-good moment for all.
3. Build dashboards to motivate the team – gamification drives healthy competition while increasing metric visibility to sales and marketing leaders. You can also use a dashboard to understand who is levering the tool most effectively and double down on that person’s specific approach.
4. When a rep gets a great response from a prospect using Alyce, amplify that acknowledgment to the team. Many of our customers have set up an Alyce Love Slack channel, including our own team!
5. Designate a certain day of the week as Alyce Day. One of our customers has Alyce Tuesday’s where all the BDRs get together in a room and send out Alyce gift invitations together. It fosters camaraderie while weaving Alyce into the fabric of the sales culture.
6. Pique the team’s interest every so often by teasing out what is coming next in the product that will either save them time or drive greater results.
7. Have whatever you deem your Alyce KPI be a part of your overall marketing & sales (or company metric) dashboard.
8. When in doubt, our Customer Success team is legendary and is incredibly invested in the continued success of our customers in a way I’ve personally never seen a MarTech/SaaS Success team be. As Ally, one of our CSMs says, “I won’t let people not be excited about Alyce.”

 

Curious about other ways we use Alyce to build our own pipeline? Check out other posts in our Alyce 360 series