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What are the best brands doing to stay relevant, build trust, and create content smarter?
At Share Your Genius, we have the same questions, so we're tapping the best in the space for their answers—one voicemail at a time.
Join us each week for quick hits of insights from b2b marketers and leaders.
Adam (00:10): Heather Bell is a strategic revenue leader with a strong track record in building scalable systems and high performing teams. As a VP of sales, she helps B2B companies create authentic customer stories at scale. Heather has held senior roles at places like WorkRamp, Envoy, OpenTable, and User Evidence with over a decade of experience in SaaS sales and consultative driving results and making data-driven
decisions across global markets. During her time at user evidence, she used a tool that was such a powerful platform for buyers to better understand the sales journey. But as the of sales, she was responsible for building pipeline. I was curious how she squared that understanding that the best sales process is often driven by recommendations and community with the fact that you need to drive pipeline in the short term as well. So I asked her.
How do you find the balance between outbound and community-driven sales?
Heather Bell (01:16): Hey, Adam. Something that I was thinking about is every CEO on LinkedIn is really saying the same thing right now. And most sales teams are missing what they're actually asking for. They're under margin pressure. They need to prove ROI. So when I see that signal, I'm not sending generic seeing teams like yours solve this exact problem, and here's what separates the ones who can actually prove it worked from the ones who just hope that it happened. So it's not a pitch, it's help. Community and outbound become the same motion.
Ultimately, we do strike a balance where I would say 75% of our focus is going to be on warm folks, folks who we've had engagements with on places like LinkedIn or that our marketers engage with in marketing-only communities. So for sales, it's really about staying in your lane of meeting folks where they then also really getting to know them and understand their problems so that outbound play that you're going to make is warm. and we're focused way less on cold outreach since I think we all know right now it's just not working.
So it is definitely a combination of tech stack and relationship to go out and get great outbound. We use a few tools for intent so that we're looking at intent both from, I think, of classic intent places like job, former user, new company, going that next level deeper and looking at things like mutual investors or folks who have a ton of hiring or who are launching a product, since those for us are often good triggers that they are ready to buy. So we're combining that with then making the motion as easy as possible for the team through easy sequences so that they have the outline of, hey, here's the rough framework of what somebody in this situation probably needs, but now you go in and you personalize it.
The final piece though is really the executive team. So we're looking at first degree connections that the executive team has and then ultimately outbound is a company goal. It's not a sales goal. It's everybody doing their best to make sure that they're a really good representative of the brand and somebody who, you know, when I reach out to someone who I'm connected on LinkedIn,
They not only recognize me, but then they're also willing to take a call because we put out enough thought leadership as a company in communities that folks see that we have something valuable that they would want to learn.