From April 27th to May 1st, we had the distinct honor of hosting 32 special guests: a mix of B2B industry leaders, inspirational speakers, marketing mavens, yoga enthusiasts, sales gurus, fitness phenoms, culinary pros, and customer success experts – to help us run our inaugural annual event, YOUniverse.
These experts shared musings, strategies, and best practices around Personal Experience and how to turn one-to-many touches in the buyer’s journey, into truly one-to-one moments.
With five days of incredible content, there were so many valuable key learnings from each session. It was hard, but we boiled it down to 8 powerful lessons.
Build Trust, The Rest Will Follow
“Trust is not an equilibrium, marketers do not start marketing with the opportunity to build trust. You’re starting from a deficit.” Katie Martell – Documentarian and Marketing Consultant
Only 4% of people trust marketing. Through all the automation we’ve done in the last 10 years, marketers and sellers have put themselves in a place where our buyers’ words hold more weight than our own.
That’s why customer reviews are becoming one of the most effective ways to market right now. The key to all of this trust-building is the underlying understanding of empathy. This isn’t a new concept. People want to be seen, heard, and understood.
Looking for tools that allow you to be personal at scale? Check out the Alyce personal gifting platform.
Before You Ask For 15 Minutes of Their Time, Put in 5 Minutes of Your Own.
“When I think about quality outreach, there are two things in my head: Being personal and being relevant. You have to find a way to incorporate both.” Becc Holland – Head of Sales Development at Chorus.ai
“What would happen if…” it’s a classic discovery question in the sales cycle.. The problem is that future state questions don’t get to the heart of the issues now. If you dig deeper, this reveals a more serious sales problem: Lack of relevance.
Trying to sell to a company that’s not experiencing the problem your product helps solve means you’ll be wasting your time and the buyer’s time trying to pitch your solution to them. Like Becc mentioned above, your outreach to book that first meeting should be both personal AND relevant.
Being personal without relevance will make someone like you because you recognized who they are, but they won’t buy from you because they don’t think that you can do anything for them. Relevance without being personal may have someone buy something from you but you’re not different and you won’t standout.
Do your homework before the call so you can have a personal and relevant conversation in the moment.
If you can’t point to why you are reaching out, don’t.
“You don’t need to sell to every account in your territory, nor should you expect that every account in your territory needs to buy from you. Your job as a sales rep is to find the accounts that are likely needing what you are selling and find them at the right time.” Mark Ebert – VP of Sales at 6Sense
The mindset of sales should shift to the buyer. And you know what’s ok? If a prospect isn’t the best fit for your product or service, or if it’s the right time for them to buy that’s normal, that happens to every single sales person, and should be a relief. You should be leveraging buying intent signals from your territory so you only have to focus your time on the accounts with the greatest propensity to buy.
A sales process is a commitment. If there’s a lack of commitment from one side, then the deal will fall apart later on down the line when there is more at stake.
Commit To Your Craft
“When it comes to stepping out of your comfort zone, putting things online, and teaching people, you know you won’t be good [until you master your craft]. And rather than own it [and take the steps to become an expert], you bag on people who do and that’s why people don’t build personal brands.” Keenan – Award-Winning Author and CEO of A Sales Guy Consulting
Building a personal brand is incredibly important to build up your credibility as a seller. Master sellers understand the day to day, problem, environment, situation, and impact of pain of those they sell to. And having that understanding builds credibility around your name.
If you earn credibility with somebody you become an asset to them and they want you around. It’s not your title that gives you credibility, it’s how you display how you know what is going on.
Level up any experience, virtual or in-person, by being personal.
“We all still want to connect with other people on a human level and we can bring that element into the virtual space with three things: Creativity, Consideration, Care.” Ryan Brown – Head of Brand at Ceros
Connecting in person made us and our marketing efforts more human when we could attend in-person events. How you can create that experience digitally is the new task for field marketers.
Not all virtual events have to be the same format. Use the same methodology you would with in-person events to make them feel more human. VIP Experiences versus Top of Funnel Content versus Customer Focused Events will help your audience feel more connected to you and your brand.
Treat your virtual event just as seriously as your in-person events and your attendees will do the same.
“When you do virtual events, whether it’s live or you’re asking people to pre-record content, people need a little bit of video and on-camera training… We offered video training services and on-camera performance workshops for our speakers and that elevated the event and levels up the content.” Stephanie Biaocchi – Director of Community & Events at IMPACT
If you’re putting on a virtual event, use the same consideration for vetting and scheduling talks as you would in-person. Run dress rehearsals, and on camera performance workshops to help create a more professional feeling event no matter where your speaker is situated.
Deep relationships come from personal connection, not automation.
“Account based marketing is a huge part of our strategy and for our largest accounts the marketing has to be unbelievably personal….And every single one of those accounts has a one-to-one strategy. It’s a heavy lift but when you get into the long term relationship with that account, there’s only one option.” Elle Woulfe – VP of Growth at InVision
There’s only one option to market your way into a larger enterprise account, and outreach that’s sent in a one-to-many format doesn’t work at all or very well. You have to really get to know the account and market ONLY to them.
Personalization misses the mark here, you have to actually get personal. Putting in the work to make your data clean and reliable will allow you to be personal at scale.
Looking for clean data that will help your team stay relevant, relatable, and respectful in their outreach? Check out Alyce’s human augmented AI gifting platform.
The difference between a customer journey and the customer experience is emotional connection.
“Being personal is not one way. It’s not your customers being super open and personal with you, it’s you also leading first and showing that this is the environment that you’re creating. One of honesty, and transparency.” Sonciary Honnoll – Founder of Quala
The way your customers feel about your company and your product is through the depth of connection your team makes with your customers, not the amount of time spent with your customers.
If you service small businesses, chances are you’ll spend less time talking to them than a company that only services large, enterprise businesses. But that doesn’t matter if the time you DO spend with your customers make them feel bonded to you, from #5to9 and from 9-to-5. This allows you to scale a functioning customer success motion that earns trust, builds rapport, and drives loyalty.
Optimizing your customer’s journey will only make your internal processes more streamlined. You should also be taking into account the customer experience and how emotionally connected your customers are to your business, team, and product.
Want to relive the magic and excitement of YOUniverse? Check out all the on-demand sessions here!
Mary Matton
Mary Matton is the Growth Marketing Manager for Alyce, and is obsessed with all things inbound and demand gen. Outside of work, her #5to9 interests include perfecting her mobile photography, the quest for the perfect iced coffee, and spending time with the people most important to her.