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Podcast

Increasing Sales Through Personalisation & Feedback with Casey Hill, Head of Growth at Bonjoro

Casey Hill – www.bonjoro.com

Ontraport expert case study for everlast epoxy image

Name: Casey Hill

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseyhill 

Company Name: Bonjoro

Company Website: www.bonjoro.com

Short Bio:

Casey currently is a top 10 Quora writer on SaaS Sales, SaaS Marketing & SaaS, as well as has had his insights featured in over 100 publications on sales, marketing and business.

Show Notes

On today’s episode, we are speaking with Casey Hill, who is head of growth at www.bonjoro.com. Bonjoro is a personalised video software tool that plugs into your business processes allowing you to create ad-hoc 1 to 1 videos for your customers on the fly.

Casey is super knowledgeable about sales and marketing and I love his approach to customer feedback, his dedication to using the sales team as a feedback mechanism to improve the whole business, not just sales.

If you enjoy the episode, please take 10 seconds to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or like, share and follow with your favourite pod catcher!

Casey’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseyhill
Bonjoro Website: www.bonjoro.com

Transcription

Sam Wilcox:

So Casey Hill, head of growth, Bonjoro. Thanks for joining me on the podcast, man. How’s it going?

Casey Hill:

Yeah. It’s going great. Thanks so much for having me, Sam.

Sam Wilcox:

No worries, no worries. So for anybody that’s listening, why don’t we start off by just giving everybody a bit of a heads up in terms of what Bonjoro is, and maybe a little bit of a background on yourself and kind of like how you got into this position of head of growth? Just to fill everybody in in terms of like, what it is that you’re actually doing now.

Casey Hill:

Yeah, absolutely. So I work for a company called Bonjoro. We do personal video emails. And what’s a little bit unique about Bonjoro is that we integrate in with a lot of native systems. So some of the video tools that you may have heard of like Loom are awesome for one off video, but if you’re looking at something that ties in with your email automation, your CRM system, that’s what we do. So that’s kind of our positioning. And my background, I’ve been mostly involved in sales throughout the last 10 years of my life. And I’ve also done a little bit of consulting on the outside in the marketing side. And that experience kind of culminated in where I am now, which is the head of growth, which is a synergy of marketing and sales. So I have a small sales team. We’re a relatively small company, just 20 of us. So there’s just a handful of reps that are SDR/a little bit of hybrid roles, honestly at this age. So we operate that, and then I also oversee some of our marketing and growth initiatives on that side as well.

Sam Wilcox:

So obviously you mentioned the sales side of things and the marketing side of things, and kind of like the combination of those being growth, let’s say now, which is like the… I think that’s like a new role really, that exists, isn’t it? I say new, over the past like five to 10 years, maybe-ish. What do you think about that? So how do you think about where marketing and sales begins? Do you have any methodology in regards to that? Or are you at the side where it’s all tied into one, you look at it as one whole thing? What’s your general thoughts on it?

Casey Hill:

Yeah. Well, I think one of the challenges today is that for a lot of companies, they’re far more disconnected than they should be, right? I see that we have a big problem in our current world that there’s a lot of silos, right? Like the product team, and the marketing team, and the sales team exist in silos, and I think that creates a lot of challenges. So I think more and more organizations are looking at this and saying, “Look, we need to have a really tight relationship between our marketing and our sales teams.” So still at our company, we have people that are purely in the marketing and purely in the sales world, right? We actually have a CFO who oversees all of the top level marketing stuff as well. But I think that the reason we have rules like growth is so that we can really keep those departments very tightly working together. So that’s one of my roles, right? Is to make sure for our marketing team, that we’re really clearly communicating what’s happening on the front lines. Because sales is your front line, right?

You’re having a conversation with people for the first time, you’re hearing about where people are confused, about where they’re stuck, and you’re getting an impression. When you get leads that come in from marketing, what is the impression they start with, right? You need sales to feed that back and say, “Hey, people, they’re assuming that we’re this type of solution. That’s not quite right. We need to shift our messaging, right?”

Sam Wilcox:

Right. So there needs to be, that continues with the feedback loop between the two areas?

Casey Hill:

Yeah. Exactly. I think that’s a core part of one of the things that I’m really trying to instill and make sure that… Because I think that’s always the tension, right? People are like, “We gave you good leads.” And the other team is like, “These leads suck.”

Sam Wilcox:

That’s the age old sales versus marketing adage, isn’t it that one? Yeah, bad leads and the complaints that come along with it. That’s interesting. So from a KPI perspective, how does that work out for you? Like what are you kind of measured on, I suppose? And this is just me being totally curious and maybe a little bit nosy. So feel free to tell me to turn around and exit. But I’m just interested in terms of, if we look at marketing, as we just mentioned, like traditionally, they’re all going to be about lead generation. That’s the KPI from their side of things, “How many leads can we generate?” And sales is all about, “How many of those can be turned into customers, right?” So what’s the growth KPI?

Casey Hill:

Yeah. So for me, it’s revenue.

Sam Wilcox:

Right. Okay. Got it.

Casey Hill:

Nested underneath that, we still look at MQLs. So we still look at specific projects and campaigns I run. And if I run a growth experiment, it’s like, what are the actual market qualified leads that are generated from that? And absolutely in sales, we still have quotas, or salespeople are responsible for bringing in a certain number of paid accounts on a monthly basis. And we’re obviously looking at conversion rates. So it starts at a high level of, “I’m responsible for moving the needle on revenue as an organization.” And then underneath that, there’s a lot of individual OKRs that are broken down to how we’re going to accomplish that.

Sam Wilcox:

Interesting, man. Interesting. Can we talk a little bit about your sales process? Because that’s something I’m obviously interested in, in terms of that’s pretty much what we focus on here at Trifecta. I suppose we would sit on the sales side of the fence, right? Because what I will come in and do is teach our clients how to turn more leads into customers. We don’t necessarily get involved in the marketing side of things. So I’m all about learning as much about sales processes and the different variations of the sales process as possible. So can you give us a bit of a rundown in terms of like, what the Bonjoro sales process looks like, maybe what your customer profiles look like and what kind of work you’re doing, so that kind of stuff, and how people move through that journey?

Casey Hill:

Yeah. 100%. So I think the first thing and just a high level to start out with is that I’ve always tried to embrace myself, and it’s also how I educate my team by just having a very strong consultative focus, right? I try to get people, when they hop on the conversations with their team to not think of them as sales agents. And I think that starts with, from an approach standpoint, having a very rigorous education setup. So really investing and making sure that your-

Sam Wilcox:

For the team, you mean that? Sorry. Sorry to interrupt. You mean education for the team?

Casey Hill:

For the team.

Sam Wilcox:

Right. Right. Right. Not the customer side of things. Well, obviously the customer as well, but you’re talking about specifically as the team, right?

Casey Hill:

Yeah. Hopping back a step to five years ago, I started as an entry level salesperson in a marketing company called Ontraport, right? And one of the things that I think helped me become very successful in that environment was I actually launched an e-commerce business about six months after I started at that company. So I got first hand experience about what small businesses were experiencing. I spent $20,000 on Facebook ads, I ran landing pages, I was fulfilling orders. So that experience really opened my eyes to, okay, the more perspective that we can get beyond just the platform… I believe that what really helped me be successful is I understood the environment of small businesses, and I could then take that into my sales conversations in a way that was a lot more sophisticated than if I just knew our feature stack super well. So that’s the first thing.

I walked away from that experience, and when I started bringing on new sales hires here at Bonjoro, I was like, “I want to be very rigorous with a couple things.” Number one, making sure they don’t just know the feature stack, but they also know the industry. So I’m constantly saying, “I want you to download all of our competitors. I want you in those hoods, I want you going through those processes, I want you following education about where the personal video space is going. I want you to understand that overall environment.” And then the second piece related to my experience, too, is I strongly encourage people to start their own side gigs. I push the people on my team to say, “Find something you’re passionate about. It doesn’t have to be huge, it doesn’t have to be crazy or glamorous, but I want you in their learning process firsthand.” Because I’ve seen the impact that that has on the ability of those people to drive impact. So those are a couple things like starting out in terms of how we train them. And our market is pretty diverse, we deal with a lot. We deal with e-commerce, we deal with SaaS companies, we deal with real estate charities. So we have a pretty wide footprint.

Right now we’re at an interesting stage where we’re kind of up marketing a little bit. So we’re moving into a slightly more sophisticated audience. And part of the reason for that is one of our major differentiators, as I noted was that integration piece. So a lot of times very small businesses maybe don’t have as many systems. So that value proposition is maybe slightly weaker than if your company is a little more established, then you can really gain a lot of benefit from having that dynamic trigger that hits whenever someone books a call so you can reach out and drop demo no-show, right? Or you can use that to personally welcome each time a customer walks through. Like some of our key use cases, we found were very well fitted for organizations that were just a little bit of a step up.

Sam Wilcox:

We’ll have to cover a couple of those use cases as well on the podcast after we’ve gone through this because I think that demo no-show is super relevant to the audience as well. So we’ll talk a little bit about that but sorry to interrupt, carry on.

Casey Hill:

Yeah. No. No. No. Actually, honestly, that’s a good one just to drop on because it’s funny. That’s how I found out about Bonjoro. I found out about it because that was the use case we used it Ontraport. We had an issue where we had a relatively high demo no-show rate and we were kind of breaking our brains . What can we do to try to impact that metric? So we adopted Bonjoro as an organization, and the theory was, if you have a human face and you actually show the face of that rep, it might be more challenging for that person to no-show too. And I think that over time we kind of refined that pitch, and ultimately, it was really effective for us. It cut our no-show rate in half. So it was a really great experiment. But I think that-

Sam Wilcox:

That’s a big deal. That’s really big.

Casey Hill:

Yeah. It’s a huge deal. I think the reason it works is a couple fold, number one, it’s just kind of the human element, right? You have a human face and I think that’s important. But the other thing is, I think people intrinsically are a little bit worried to talk to the sales people. So again, going back to that-

Sam Wilcox:

100%, yeah. 100%. Nobody wants to speak to a sales person, let’s be honest, right? If you put the label sales person on somebody, you don’t want to speak to that person. You just don’t. Unless you are really seeking out a need. You really have a need for something and it’s urgent, then you’re okay. But in most cases, you need to try and disarm that role a little bit, don’t you?

Casey Hill:

Exactly. Exactly. So that’s what we did, is, we would say, “Hey, we actually work with a ton of digital marketing agencies, and what we’re doing with a lot of agencies is X, Y, Z.” So the person immediately starts to… Not only they have a human face, but their level of confidence has now increased. Because like, “Okay. This isn’t just a sales rep. This person really seems to know this industry, they come across as someone who’s confident, intelligent, and knowledgeable about space.” Now there’s more anticipation for the actual event. And an interesting thing here for anyone who’s experimenting with this, is we recommend to do it right after they book, not right before the meeting. Because sometimes people will say, “Well, should I do it right… What if they book for a week later, should I do it right before the meeting or should I do it right after they book? I feel very strongly from looking at the data that’s more effective right after they book.

And the reason is, is because systems like calendar knows, they always already send reminders, right? It’s not that many people aren’t getting reminders. Every calendar system under the sun says, “Hey, you have a meeting tomorrow. You have a meeting in 10 minutes.” They already get that. The idea is to create more of an anticipation where someone’s looking forward to an event. And that, I think, is something that opens doors and helps you be more efficient. So yeah. That’s kind of one use case and one thought. And yeah, I mean, besides I guess, the training side, in terms of how we operate as an organization, I tend to be very case study focused as well. So what I mean by that is, I really encourage my team to try to leverage specific case studies. We have all this collateral that we’ve built, I guess you would call it on the marketing or content side. So figuring out how to have your follow-up not just be this whole generic, “Checking in. How are things going?” But like a value added follow-up.

And that was a big evolution for me too, because I saw so many teams… I do outside consulting, as I noted as well, and I saw so many teams that were just stuck on numbers. We need to follow up four times. And they’re still stuck on these raw things that they… Sales people follow the incentive structures you put in front of them, right? So if you tell someone, “You need to follow-up seven times.” Yeah, they’ll follow-up seven times, but is the quality going to be there? Not necessarily, right? So you have to align your KPIs and your objectives as an organization with the incentive structures of your sales team in a way that’s going to produce the most ideal results. And I think that’s a really, really smart and important thing to do. And it’s something you want to keep evolving.

I’ll give you an example, at my time back at Ontraport, we shifted some of our internal KPIs, we used to have it so that your reward, or I guess your kind of payback was based on the size of the account. So if you got a team account that was worth much more than a base camp, but we started to realize it was creating a bad incentive structure for our sales team. So our sales team was much more incentivized to sell a team account than they were for a basic account, even if that wasn’t what was best for the person, which leads to high churn, right?

Sam Wilcox:

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I am as well. It feels bad for the people that are just trying to sign up with a basic account. Maybe they don’t get as much attention as the team accounts, right? So even on the way in, yes, they’re more likely to churn because they’ve been sold into a team account, but even on the way in, they get, not miss treated, but less attention than they would if they were a potential team account, right?

Casey Hill:

Yeah. 100%. So that’s I think, one thing that we’ve been working hard on Bonjoro, that is really figuring out how to find that ideal spot where we’re providing that good, strong incentive for the sales team to go chase, but also not overselling so that we get ourselves into churn problems or run into some of those challenges. So it’s a constantly evolving process. I mean, that’s the thing, I think in sales and marketing, you’ve got to keep iterating. You don’t want something to be static because your business should always be changing.

Sam Wilcox:

Definitely, man. Yeah, that’s something that we always preach as well as. The system that we set up for our clients here, the full stack sales system, out of the box we say like, “Look, this is going to get you a full sales process, end-to-end, fully documented, but this is V1. This isn’t the end goal. You’ve now got a process that allows you and your team to scale, but also it gives you what you need to measure and optimize to continually improve moving forward, because it’s not going to be be-all and end-all, right? This is version one of your scalable sales process and there’s always room for improvement.”

Casey Hill:

I was just going to agree with you on the process. I’d like for anyone listening here, you need to have a structure to start with, though. Because so many small businesses, you realize they don’t, right? They come into it and they’re kind of new to it, or you even maybe have a co-founder who’s doing sales when you’re starting out and you’re just a couple people. And I think that you have to start with something because that gives you your baseline, then you iterate from. So I think that’s an important thing for listeners who are maybe in the earlier stage, develop out a standardized process so that you can then replicate. And also, it’s really important for a sales team, I think, to have comparative metrics. So if you have three reps and they’re all following the same process, you now have an easier way to gauge. One of the challenges I see with early business, you have one rep. And if you only have one rep working by themselves, it’s really hard to know if they’re doing a good or bad job, because there’s no comparison.

Sam Wilcox:

Yes. I mean, we give an example quite a few times where it’s like you might have a few reps like two or three, let’s say, because you kind of build a new sales team at the beginning, and if there’s no process around it and they’re both doing… Let’s say one is doing good and one is doing not so good, you have no idea why because, let’s say John is doing one thing and Jane is doing another, but you don’t actually know what John is doing that’s working, and you don’t know what is Jane doing that’s not working, or vice versa. So you have to have this baseline process? And this is the whole thing about what we talked about in terms of building a scalable sales process, because if you don’t have a process, it’s just not scalable, right?

But just to rewind it back to what you were talking about in regards to the case studies, since me and you spoke last, I checked out a lot of your case studies. I know you guys put a lot of effort into those. It’s something that we preach a lot about as well, in terms of nurture sequences, and the kind of automated touch points that we do build out for clients is, you really want to have that mix of case studies, stories, testimonials, and the personal one-to-one check ins as well, right? Just checking in, see if there’s any questions. You need to strike that balance. And it can’t all be just the sales rep checking in as it were in inverted commas. How have you found those case studies affects your overall sales process and results?

Casey Hill:

Yeah. I mean, we’ve had really good success with incorporating in… One of the things I basically told my team, I was like, “I want you, either through a case study,” or we have a lot of other templates. We have guides, but I told them, I said, “I really want you to follow up, especially in those first two follow-ups. So especially in those first few follow-ups, I really want those to be laid in…” Everyone says things like, “Lead with value,” and that’s kind of a generic, almost cliche term.” But to me, what that means is like leading with value . If you reach out and you say something like, “Hey, based on our last conversation, I just thought you might find this case valuable.” This is someone who’s trying to do something very similar to you guys. And actually, in section three, they outline X thing that you were talking about.” And the person understands that this is very catered and tailored to them. And that’s one thing that I think is really important to me as well. Honestly, I work for a personal video company, personalization is super important. And that’s a tenet that I push really hard. At a core level, it’s about relationships. And anyone who’s in sales understands it’s about relationships, right?

So one of the ways that you’re building relationships is trying to increase that personalization and try to make your experience memorable. Because many of these people, especially when they’re an evaluation stage, they’re looking at a lot of tools, right? They’re looking at a lot of platforms. They have a lot of options. You’re not the only… It’s not just like, “Are you to play or not?” It’s like there’s five players and which one may be the best fit for that person? So the more that you develop a relationship with them, the more that you are memorable in their mind. I think that’s what’s kind of giving you a little bit of a competitive edge.

Sam Wilcox:

I find it interesting that you take this approach to sales, because for the most part, and I’m sure you’ll be well aware already that most SaaS companies, they’re trying to build a hands-off model, right? Self-serve situation where there’s as little touch points as possible from a human that’s part of the business, like a sales team, for example, unless it’s like high end enterprise sales software, right. Usually, obviously, there’s much bigger sales cycles, and touch points, and teams that will kind of manage those accounts. So I find it interesting that you guys for a product that isn’t actually… In terms of the cost, it’s not something that is crazy expensive, right?

Casey Hill:

It’s a cheap product. It’s a cheap product.

Sam Wilcox:

Right. So it’s interesting that you guys take this approach to sales because it’s not necessarily traditional with a product of that price range.

Casey Hill:

It’s certainly not, but here’s kind of the math behind it. So as an example, we ran an internal test. So when we started to scale up, we’re starting to get a couple thousand trials that were coming in because we have freemium models, we have a free plan that we pay for, right? We started getting a couple thousands, and in the early days, we used to personally welcome every single person. And then at some point we’re like, “Okay. We need to build systems, we need to scale this. We’re at 3,000 people, we can’t personally welcome them.” So we stopped that for a while. But we ran a really interesting text about… I was actually on a podcast talking about all this data really in depth recently, but basically, we decided what-

Sam Wilcox:

What was the podcast, just in case anybody wants to go and check out? What was it?

Casey Hill:

It’s John Bonini’s Databox.

Sam Wilcox:

John Bonini’s. Oh, I love Databox. I love Databox products. Yeah, I love listening to John.

Casey Hill:

I think it’s called Metrics & Chill, which is funny because my name is Casey Hill, so it’s like Metrics & Chill with Chill. Anyways.

Sam Wilcox:

Yeah. I think they changed the name of it recently, actually, didn’t they? To that. I love that name. Yeah, that’s great.

Casey Hill:

I think I might have been the first actually recording on the new rebrand. But regardless, one of the things we talked about there was a test that we ran, we said, “What if we tried it again? What if we went back? Yeah, it’s going to take some time. We’re all going to need to be hustling to do 2,000 personal one-to-one, but what happens with our conversion rates? And what we found is, they had a massive impact. What we did is, every time a new trial signed up, we sent him a personal welcome video to say, “Hey, super excited to have you. We work a lot of people in this space.” Create that connection right when people walk through the door. We did that for every single person, and it doubled our conversion rates versus the cohort that didn’t have it, It was a huge, huge impact.

So sometimes I think when we talk about scalability… I’m an interesting person because I very much believe in automation. I very much believe in systems. That’s my background. I think you have to have that, but I think sometimes people don’t realize that personalization and systems can work together. It’s not a binary choice if you do one or the other, right? You build systems to save you time so you can focus on the relation building activities that are going to drive the most revenue. So for us, and I think for many software companies, when you initially look at something that might take you an extra 50 hours a month across the team, you’re like, “Well, that’s a big commitment.” But if that starts driving millions of dollars in revenue, then obviously by nature of the revenue it’s generating, you become scalable because you just hire more employees, and you grow as an organization to fulfill more of that. So I think that’s something to keep in mind. We look at “scalable processes”. Sometimes things that might not initially look scalable, might be more scalable than you think if they can produce the desired results that you need to drive with them.

Sam Wilcox:

Right. Right. Well, just because something is scalable, doesn’t mean it needs to be hands off totally, right? And I actually say this a lot with the clients that come on board with us or other people that I’ve seen that kind of lean on me for automation advice in the past, where they’re trying to automate too much because they think that it’s the right thing to do. And what happens is, is that they end up taking all of the personality out of the sales process, everything is too structured, they need more of a consultative higher touch sales process model, and they think that leaning into automation to get rid of as much of that as possible is going to save them time and money because they need to hire less people. But actually, it’s damaging to the sales process. So we book it out into… Most businesses kind of fall into kind of three-ish categories. This is super generalization, but most of the people we speak to, they’re either chasing this kind of like fully automated sales process where they never have to speak to anybody, it’s totally hands-off, kind of like this click funnels mentality of like, “Let’s just upsell, down sell and just make sure that we can extract all value that way.”

Then there’s this like a semi-automated bunch of businesses, which is more of like a service-based business that needs to provide at least some kind of face-to-face interaction to make a sale, which is the type of businesses that we work with the most. And then you’ve got like the really low automation, which is the super high ticket services and products that require years, if not decades sometimes to around certain deals. So my belief is that that middle bracket is the best bracket to be in for most people, and optimizing for what’s right in terms of time spent on relationship building and personalization, and systems, and making that balance right in the middle, is where the gold is for a lot of businesses. And I think sometimes people are trying to get past that into more of the automation side of things because they think that it’s the right thing to do, but it’s actually more damaging to the sales process, in my opinion.

Casey Hill:

Yeah. 100%. And the only thing I want to add to that too, is that I think also people need to realize that sales is also about being an ear to the customer. So another thing that people aren’t thinking about when they calculate that value is, when my team does hundreds and hundreds of demos, we learn about the key things that people are struggling with, where they’re out, what are they confused about the product? That feedback is incredibly valuable and that’s part of sales. Like that’s part of having those conversations. If you’re fully automated and you’re only reliant on people actually writing into you when they have problems, you’re going to miss so freaking much, and you’re going to be leaving money on the table if you do that. So I think that’s a new thing for people to consider.

Sam Wilcox:

That’s a valuable point actually, mate. Yeah. That’s something I’ve not really thought about too much. And I think that is a really, really valuable point.

Casey Hill:

Yeah. So that’s something I encourage people to think of. And another thing, Jason Lumpkin, who’s a sales leader that I really look up to in the SaaS world, one of the things he talks about too, is especially when you’re early stage, you need to spend more time, right? You have to earn your chops a little bit to go up. If you’re a business and you’re sub one million ARR, you have to be more time intensive. I don’t care if the deals are $10 a month, it’s required for you to lift that rock to create that customer evangelism as an organization. If you’re so stuck on like, “It has to be hands off,” but you’re a tiny, tiny business, your growth is going to be tough. So I think that’s another thing to look out too, is company size and where you’re at as an organization.

Sam Wilcox:

Yeah. I suppose what you’re saying there is that you almost want your sales reps to be the voice of the customer back to the internal business, right? Because they’re the ones that are probably going to see the most… Well, obviously, the most objections and most of the common fears or whatever that clients might have, or customers might have during that signup process. And that needs to feed back into marketing, as you were saying earlier. Needs to feed back into the product as well and like the whole thing, right?

Casey Hill:

This is a huge thing, honestly, I really believe most people just look at customer support. They look at customer support and say, “Customer support will tell us the problems.” And that’s great for people once they’re established, but they have to understand that when people are in a sales headset or in a mind frame, it’s different from the actual customer in terms of their level of investment. So you need to know what those subtle cues are that are turning people off when they’re not as invested. They’re not going to write into your support team. They don’t care enough about the product in the free trial, they’re not invested at all. If you have certain stopping points, they’re just going to leave, right? They’re not going to tell you why they left. They’re not going to fill out your survey where you ask them, “Why did you leave?” They’re not that invested. So I think it’s a retune of your mindset of saying, sales is a vital part of your organization to provide that front end feedback to all the other departments and it can’t be done by marketing, it can’t be done by customer success or customer onboarding. Sales has a unique window to this specific type of insight. And it’s important to distill that.

Sam Wilcox:

Absolutely, man. Count me in. You sold me on that point, for sure. That’s something I’ve not thought about too much. And I think that’s something that I’m going to take away from this and actually ruminate on that for a little bit. That’s super important. Thanks for that. So as we kind of round the show out, after you’ve dropped all those knowledge bombs on us, Casey, let me ask you a couple of basic questions around this out, and then I’ll leave you to your busy day. In terms of software, obviously we’re always talking about software here in a SaaS business, apart from Bonjoro, which we obviously recommend everybody checks out, what software tools do you use and love? And what would you recommend to anybody that’s running a business or a sales org to check out? Any kind of tips, tricks, hacks, or resources that you have found useful?

Casey Hill:

Yeah, for sure. So there’s a couple, and some of these may or may not be applicable to listeners depending on their stage, but one that jumps to mind immediately is Segment. So Segment provides us data about everything that people do inside of our platform, because we’re a software platform. So why that’s really important from a sales perspective is because it’s really important for us to have insight on, are people looking at their system? Are people creating templates? Are people taking X behavior? The more context our sales team has, the better off we are. So I realized that might not apply to all types of businesses, but I do think that what should apply is having context. The more context you have, and that can be collected through surveys or other means if you don’t have something like Segment. But having some sort of software that gives you context, I believe is super, super important. The same thing with marketing where we talked about how segmentation is so important. And you really need to segment and send a targeted message. In sales, you really need to cater to their specific problems, you need to understand that problem in depth. And the more context points you have, the more you can lead with that relevant case study, the more you can lead with that relevant bit at any point during the cycle. So that’s one that’s valuable to us.

Sam Wilcox:

Can I ask you a question on that? Because I wanted to… So I know of Segment, it’s not something I’ve installed for any clients at all, but just a quick geeky question. What’s that like to set up? Because in my head, I know that Segment, it will play up in tracking the events and stuff in your software, but it also pulls in data sources from other areas as well, like different tools all into one CDP, I think you call it, right? Is that right, customer data platform? Data from all different sources into this one system. It kind of shows you the whole journey and touch points and events that happen. This is super detail, but do you have to set up all of those events manually or does it automatically track all of the events just by adding the code?

Casey Hill:

I don’t want to mislead here. This was set up by our dev team.

Sam Wilcox:

Right. Right. Right. If the devs are involved, it’s events, no doubt, and it’s all manual.

Casey Hill:

Yeah. I’m the beneficiary of it because the way I used Segment initially was we used ActiveCampaign as our CRM/ESP. And I hooked in Segment so that it was basically sending all that data in for new deals as they got added into our reps pipelines. So our reps had that immediate conduct. And for that part, it was literally like we just flipped a switch, and any fields that existed in Segment that we had data on, just poured it over into AC automatically. So there wasn’t even a field mapping that was required. It was actually literally just like, if the field type was the exact same name, it just went across. So super simple and easy for us to pass on across. Definitely not a time intensive process. So that I think was helpful. And that’s another system we use that I think is valuable as well is ActiveCampaign. That’s where we actually do all of our pipeline management. And that’s helpful just because it’s easy for our reps to see what stage things are in, based on certain behavior people can dynamically move through stages. I know you work a lot with Ontraport which does a lot of the same thing. So there’s a lot-

Sam Wilcox:

Yeah. And ActiveCampaign as well. We work with ActiveCampaign as well, and lose and other tools as well. I think the CRM is an interesting and diverse topic, let’s say.

Casey Hill:

For sure, yeah.

Sam Wilcox:

All with that nuance.

Casey Hill:

We could talk for hours, I’m sure, on just CRMs and ESPs.

Sam Wilcox:

Yeah, absolutely, man. All right. Cool. So anything else you want to share with the audience or any other tips, tricks, any resources, or is that pretty much about the main things that you want to share?

Casey Hill:

I think those are some of the core things. What I always tell people… What I like to close out and tell people around if you’re looking to optimize conversions, try personalization, right? I know that I work for personal video companies, that’s one avenue, but even beyond that, I mean, there’s lots of ways. You can do handwritten cards, personalization can manifest itself in a lot… Sometimes it can even be like a specific targeted gift. You were talking with someone, they said they’re really interested in this and you send a book to them and they get that book and they’re like, “Whoa, no way. That was something related to this topic.”

The idea is to start thinking about that relationship side more as an organization, and to really make sure you lean into that. And then, from a process standpoint, you need to make sure you report on it. So if you’re going to try these personalizations, that’s an awesome thing. But if you don’t report on it, you don’t have the metrics, you’re not going to know if it works. So this is really important to have some sort of quantifiable way to compare it against your old methodologies so you can see what is the impact of doing these certain phone calls, these text messages, these personal videos or they’re sending me small gifts, “What does that actually translate to in terms of my bottom line?” And that’s one, I think, is super important. So get personal and test, that’s my big takeaway I want to meet people with.

Sam Wilcox:

Love it, man. All right. Thanks, Casey. That’s really awesome. I think we’ve all learned a lot, even myself, that point around the sales team insights is key. So I’m going to take that one away, man. I appreciate your time. And thanks for joining us on the show today, man.

Casey Hill:

Thank you so much.

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