Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 139: Jason Prindle, the Senior Director of Global Sales Development at Big ID, talks about his experience with hyper-personalization along with his four-pronged approach and how to put that approach into real-life

Transcript

139: Jason Prindle, the Senior Director of Global Sales Development at Big ID, talks about his experience with hyper-personalization along with his four-pronged approach and how to put that approach into real-life · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird Podcast, which exists because it's cybersecurity startups.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to get go-to-market fit, grow revenue, and scale the sales team.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sales Bluebird provides tips, tricks, experiences, examples, inspiration, and ideas from people who've been doing this for many years and at many companies.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and this episode is part of a series of podcast episodes on pipeline generation.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: It will be no surprise to listeners that the number one challenge right now for sellers in cybersecurity is generating pipeline.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And in these episodes, we'll be sales leaders, individual contributors, demand generation practitioners, and experts whose business is all about generating pipelines.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: We want you to have fresh ideas, approaches, and tips that you can use to transform your pipeline either as a sales leader or as an individual contributor.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, everyone.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: My name is Jason Prindle, and I'm the senior director of global sales development at Big ID.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm here today to talk about innovative and practical pipeline generation tips that you can use to generate more pipeline.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: What I'm going to talk about today is hyper-personalization.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we've used this methodology over the course of the last five quarters here at Big ID.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: And we have exceeded pipeline goals every single quarter.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: We have grown our pipeline generation quarter over quarter every single quarter in those last five, as well as set a couple of pipeline generation records.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: So why are we doing hyperpersonalization?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: So the first is the why.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: We went out and we spoke to prospects, current customers, as well as the internal folks within our business that are the candidates that we're going to be reaching out to at other businesses, right?
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: They fit the profile or the title of the folks that we're trying to prospect.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we asked them what would they respond to?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer overwhelmingly that they all gave was that they want the messages that they receive and they want to receive outreach from SDRs or sales folks who understand who they are, understand their business, understand what's important to them, what pains they go through, what are the troubles they go through, and then how can we help?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: And on the surface, that seems obvious, right?
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: The message should be I know who you are, and here's how I can help you.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: And should we talk some more?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: But unfortunately, it's not.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the messages that go out right now are just a tech sheet of all the features of what they can do, uh, maybe a story of another customer that that may or may not relate or whatever, but nonetheless, it doesn't speak to that particular person.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: So we are leaning into hyper-personalization.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: Hyper-personalization means that every message that goes out to every prospect is customized and personalized so that it speaks directly to that particular person.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um now to do that isn't easy, right?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: You have to be able to uh enable the SDRs or the sellers to put together coherent messages that that make sense to these particular prospects.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you also have to provide them with processes and tech stacks that carry the burden of efficiency that that they're probably going to lose as they're writing these customized emails and they're writing these customized messages.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, as well as you have to lower expectations on KPIs.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: This is no longer a 125, 200 calls a day or activities a day type of role.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like it should be a lot less than that because we're going to be very deliberate.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to be very personalized, and each one of those messages is going to be handcrafted.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: So um, so what is hyper-personalization?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: I guess let's go back to that.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: So, what we do is we start with an email.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Very easy to write an email, and we follow a very simple uh type of format of that email.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: The first thing is personalization up top.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: Now, personalization is not that I say you like to golf, you've got a quote from Star Wars in your LinkedIn profile, uh, you went to XYZ college, anything like that, right?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: That is not personalization.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, at least it's not personalization that works.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: Personalization is you mentioned on a LinkedIn post about this that that is relevant to what I'm trying to talk about, right?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: You were at this particular event and you spoke here.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Your company has talked about XYZ that is relevant to what we do.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: That is personalization.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's saying I know who you are because I've I've done some research to find out what's important to you based on what you've said or what your company has has said, right?
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: So we start with that personalization piece.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: The second piece of that message is the assumption of pain, which is we know uh based on our customers that we've spoken to, why they bought big ID and why they bought our solution.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um we ask them, right?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: What are we trying to figure here?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: We know our use cases, we we do the research, we we understand what we're trying to solve.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: So we assume a pain.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: We assume that, you know, this is hard for you, and here's why, based off of their, again, who they are, what is their what is their role within the company, what kind of company are there, what are they?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, what stage of company are they, etc.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: So this is what we are assuming is a pain for you.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we put that assumption of pain in there.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: The third part then is the uh is the proof point.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: How can we fix that particular pain?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, whether that be then a customer story with another customer of ours that's in a related field or a competitor of theirs, um, or simply a quick little blurb about our uh uh uh our our product or one of our apps or something like that that says, here, here's how we can fix whatever that is that we assumed is a pain of yours.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um we've got an email message with personalization, an assumption of pain, a proof point.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then the very last part is a call to action.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And our calls to action are conversational.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: So all of this should be in the idea that we're consulting with the customer.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: We're not trying to get 15 minutes on their calendar.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: So we do not have any asks for time, asks for meetings, anything like that in our messages.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Our call to actions are is this something that you're looking at?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Does it make sense for us to talk further?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Would you like to learn some more about how we could do this?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: Was my assumption correct?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Things like that that are meant to spark a conversation and to allow us to get answers back and get replies back, even if they're negative, where it says, hey, that assumption is wrong, or no, we've already solved for that.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: You're now engaged with the with the prospect.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: You can now talk about other things.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: What are upcoming, other upcoming projects?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: Are there any other things that you might be interested in?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, you know, I know that some people who have fixed X still have a problem with Y, and we can help with Y.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: Whatever it is, we've now generated a conversation, which is really what we want to do.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: We want to generate a conversation.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: We need to understand can we work together with this particular prospect and then pass them off to the sales team as a qualified opportunity, not just anybody who said yes to a 15-minute meeting.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, uh, as I had mentioned earlier, the hyper-personalization part can be difficult because one, we have to lower our expectations of KPIs.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Two, we have to enable them with a tech stack and with a process that is very efficient.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: Something has to carry the load of efficiency there.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: So with the tech stack, we've built in a kind of standard where it has to integrate with all the other tools that we're looking at, or we're not gonna look at that particular technology.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: We've turned away many technologies that could be a good fit for us, but it's not, it doesn't fit specifically into the tech stack that we have.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's not going to help with efficiency.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually gonna lower efficiency by making it be another tab that the SDR has to go to, another tool that they have to go into.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Everything should be front and center for them.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: So we work on the process and the tech stack from a leadership standpoint.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: We also provide them with a research team, right?
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody has to go out and find all this information, find these LinkedIn profiles, find these annual statements, um, comb through uh Google, comb through the company blog, all of these different sources where we could possibly get this information that we can use to customize it.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: So, what we've done is we've outsourced a couple of research assistants whose job is just to do that research all day.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the SDR can say, hey, I want to go target company XYZ.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: The researcher then can take a day or two to comb through all these different sources, find the intelligence that we want, and give that back to the SDR.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: The SDR can then use that intelligence to craft these personalized messages and send them out to the prospect.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: So using this methodology, what we believe is that we're gonna actually squeeze a little more, a little more blood from the stone or a little more uh juice from the orange, whatever analogy you want to use, is that we're gonna be able to get more engagement with our prospects by sending better messages, not sending more messages.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: Now, of course, there's a few other things that go into that, waterfalling our prospects and and making sure we're not relegated down or we're not missing our opportunity to talk to the high-level targets versus the lower level targets and things like that that also help.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: But hyperpersonalization is allowing us to tell our prospects that we know who they are, we know what they care about, we know what their needs are, and that we can help them.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it's generating a lot of conversations on our side.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Appreciate your time.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: I hope this is helpful.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: If you have any questions, let me know.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with at least one other person and also hit subscribe in your podcast player.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you know someone that you want to hear from on this series of episodes on pipeline generation, let me know, please.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Email me at andrew at unstoppable.do.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's DO at the end.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Andrew at unstoppable.do.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Or you can text me directly on three oh three nine five six zero zero two four four four four four four