ON AIR: With Owen Featuring James Ski – Partnerships Manager at Drift

Introducing our 14th episode of ON AIR: With Owen – our latest interview video series with honest conversation about scaling revenue, hosted by our Founder & CEO, Owen Richards.

Our 14th guest is James Ski – Partnerships Manager at Drift

Owen and James discuss running a partnerships channel. Including: 

  • What a partnerships programme looks like 
  • Why it’s so powerful 
  • Whether it’s only right for certain types of businesses 
  • Why fewer people consider a partnerships programme at an earlier stage than James thinks should 
  • Why it isn’t more popular than it should be 
  • The importance of relationships being reciprocal 
  • What’s required to set-up a successful partnerships programme 
  • Why it’s a channel that can’t go backwards or downwards in terms of performance very easily 
  • Being aligned on business objectives and how you’re trying to drive business outcomes for your clients 
  • Whether a lower quantity of quality partners, or a higher quantity of lower quality partners is best 
  • How to remunerate partners 
  • The key to making talking about your product/service a priority for partners 
  • How long until you can expect to see your partnership programme contributing to revenue 

ON AIR: With Owen Featuring Andy Whyte – Author & Host at MEDDICC

Introducing our 13th episode of ON AIR: With Owen – our latest interview video series with honest conversation about scaling revenue, hosted by our Founder & CEO, Owen Richards.

Our 13th guest is Andy Whyte – Author & Host at MEDDICC

Owen and Andy discuss all things MEDDICC. Including: 

  • What MEDDICC is 
  • How Andy came to find MEDDICC 
  • How it compliments other sales frameworks and methodologies 
  • Why it’s so powerful in comparison to BANT 
  • The type of organisations where MEDDICC has been most successful 
  • The value that MEDDICC adds 
  • How it will increase your forecasting accuracy and create efficiencies in resource planning 
  • How much time people spend in deals that they should be out of 
  • Being more confident in yourself 
  • What MEDDICC & MEDDPICC stands for 
  • How it’s being implemented from the bottom-up 
  • The challenges of implementing it 
  • How MEDDICC identifies where you’re weak in a deal 
  • The story of how MEDDICC was founded 

Google Algorithm Update Checklist

Google’s latest algorithm update announces that page experience signals are now to be included in search ranking. These signals measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page, and combine Core Web Vitals with Google’s existing search signals.

We look at the 5 key areas to address in optimising your website for page experience and search.


Download checklist

LIVE Roundtable: Setting Up An Outbound Sales Team – Planning & Hiring

We hosted our very first LIVE roundtable as part of our NEW annual content series, around setting up an outbound sales function. Get ideas, inspiration and advice from our panel of experts, who share and discuss their own experiences and open the floor to questions from the live audience.

We’ll be going live on the last Thursday of every month for the next 12 months, chatting about all topics relating to outbound sales and the stages of building a team.

Agenda

We answered questions around (but not limited to):

1. Setting targets, forecasts and stakeholder expectations (including how far forward to forecast cost of wages and on costs, expenses (other), and revenue)

2. Building your playbook

3. Choosing your channels

4. Defining your messaging

5. Building your data strategy

6. Hiring the right people

Host

Owen Richards – Founder & CEO at Air Marketing

Speakers

Neil Clarke – Commercial Director at Air Marketing

Greg Freeman – VP Revenue at kleene.ai

Who is it for?

Founders, sales leaders and revenue leaders.

ON AIR: With Owen Featuring Caleb Buscher – Senior Channel Account Manager (EMEA Region) at HubSpot & Sophie Ambridge – Client Strategy Director at Roots to Market (HubSpot Partner)

Introducing our 12th episode of ON AIR: With Owen – our latest interview video series with honest conversation about scaling revenue, hosted by our Founder & CEO, Owen Richards.

This episode features, not one, but two guests for the first time ever on ON AIR: With Owen. Our guests are Caleb Buscher – Senior Channel Account Manager (EMEA Region) at HubSpot and Sophie Ambridge – Client Strategy Director at our sister company, Roots to Market (they’re also a HubSpot Partner!). 

Owen, Caleb and Sophie discuss how to make the most out of HubSpot as a revenue growth business tool to help drive your business forwards. Including: 

  • What HubSpot is 
  • Why Roots to Market recommends HubSpot 
  • Why businesses need a CRM 
  • What HubSpot can teach you about your customers and prospects 
  • The difficulties with not using a CRM 
  • How easy HubSpot is to implement 
  • The benefit of sales and marketing being in one place 
  • The must-do quick tips and tricks that you can implement from the start 
  • Relevancy and the ability to see when a proposal has been opened 
  • The benefits of working with Roots to Market and HubSpot 
  • What reporting HubSpot offers 
  • How a Founder can use HubSpot to learn about their own business 
  • Investing in change to see success 
  • How Individual Contributors can benefit from HubSpot 
  • The future of HubSpot and features in the pipeline 
  • What Roots to Market helps businesses with aside from HubSpot 
  • Who within an organisation tends to recognise that they need HubSpot 
  • How HubSpot helps customer experience 
  • How to get a free version of HubSpot, the functionality and why HubSpot offer this 

Onboarding your sales team

Onboarding your sales team represents a real opportunity to engage and educate your new employees about your business and shape how they speak to your market. If you get it right, your new hires will be productive sooner than you think and feel raring to go. Conversely, an ineffective or unclear onboarding experience will do little to inspire confidence in their ability to deliver their targets; or, worse, cause them to lose faith in your business resulting in a hasty departure. And this is why so many organisations experience high churn: they invest time and effort in communicating their culture throughout the interview process, but it all falls off a cliff swiftly after. You easily bridge this gap with some reflection on your onboarding experience. Think about what your employees need to know to do their jobs, e.g. product knowledge, playbooks, call scripts and training materials. Now think about what they need to be genuinely successful, training, support, mentoring and a culture where they can ask questions and seek knowledge without fear of knockbacks or reprisals.

Now you may be thinking, yeah, but salespeople will sink or swim, and they’ll be thick-skinned enough to weather anything we throw at them. That’s true for some salespeople but by no means all. As we covered in our previous blog, Planning and Hiring and Outbound Sales Function, all salespeople are different and will have a range of needs. If you take the ‘sink or swim approach’, you will experience high churn, and that’s demoralising for everyone in your team because it creates a powerful barrier to building team rapport and a high-performance culture.

Don’t overwhelm new hires

There are a few schools of thought around sales training. I believe you need to upskill and arm your new hires with the product training; they’ll need to sell your services and products effectively. You don’t need to block in two or three solid weeks of intensive training, and doing that could be counterintuitive. Research reveals 84% of sales training is forgotten within the first three months. It’s a lot for people to retain and remember, and it’s the antithesis of the in-role learning that people find so helpful once they’re taking calls. It’s worth thinking about how you can break up product training, where appropriate, with other equally valuable elements of the onboarding experience.

Train outside the classroom because exposure to the entire business matters

Draw on the experiences of everyone in the business to give your new hires a real sense of your culture, your operating model and the way you conduct business. Shadowing can provide compelling insight for recruits, so invite them to marketing meetings to see the messaging and methods you use to talk to your market, which will help them when they’re talking to prospects. Expose them to account management calls and meetings so they can get a feel for how you collaborate with and support your clients. It’s also a brilliant insight into how you deal with challenges and objections in real life outside of a formal training environment. Peer-to-peer mentoring or ‘buddy systems’ can work well to support informal, on-the-job learning and give your new hire a go-to resource for questions they don’t want to bring to management or schedule meetings to discuss.

Set clear expectations and invite honest questions

As a founder and an experienced sales professional, it matters to me that new employees know that my door is open, and they can ask me questions about the business. I want to know their concerns, and I want to encourage them to be curious and seek knowledge from their managers and peers because it’s an organic and brilliant way to learn. Equally, it’s essential that I set clear expectations and communicate my vision for the business, so we start their journey on the same page.

Embrace ready to go attitudes (whilst providing support)

This might be deemed controversial, but I can only speak from my own experience. Early on in my career, I would have been very disappointed if I’d left a new sales role and hadn’t been allowed to speak to a customer on my first day. I fully understand that different organisations have different policies. Others aren’t comfortable allowing a new hire to have a customer or prospect until they’ve completed weeks, maybe even months of training.  Where possible, I would encourage you to embrace those enthusiastic types and give them all the support they need to get going as quickly as possible; it will instil confidence and achievement they cannot get from any amount of success in role-play or simulated training environments.

If you’d like to talk more about any of the topics discussed in this blog or discuss developing your sales strategy, get in touch call 0808 178 6606 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Opinion Piece by Owen Richards, Founder & CEO

ROI Calculator

ROI Calculator

ROI Calculator

With this calculator, you’ll be able to estimate your return on investment within the first 12 months of working with Air Marketing and better understand the setup costs of doing this activity in-house.

B2B Cold Call Guide & Script Template

B2B Cold Call Guide & Script Template

B2B Cold Call Guide Artwork

There are five core sections to this script template and within each there are often multiple options on wording. You should pick and choose and test what works for you. The sections covered are:

  • Introduction – Your first impression and the way you start the call is critical.
  • Pitch – Telling your prospect why you’re calling and what you have to offer.
  • Transition to questioning/discovery – Often a missed part of the cold call.
  • Discovery/questions – The part where you uncover whether there is a good fit between your offering and your prospect’s situation.
  • Close/wrap up – If you don’t ask, you don’t get. So how do you close for the meeting?

As a bonus, we’ve also added a section on:

  • Wrap up – Ironically, most people don’t plan how to end a call after booking a meeting.
  • Objection handling – How you respond to questions and objections will define your success, so how do you overcome these.

Download the guide by filling in the form below and we’ll answer all the questions and more…

ON AIR: With Owen Featuring Rachael Howourth – Founder, Sales Coach & Mentor, MySalesMentor

Introducing our 11th episode of ON AIR: With Owen – our latest interview video series with honest conversation about scaling revenue, hosted by our Founder & CEO, Owen Richards.

Our 11th guest is Rachael Howourth – Founder, Sales Coach & Mentor at MySalesMentor and Managing Director of Momentum South West

Owen and Rachael discuss building high performance teams and cultures in a sales environment. Including: 

  • What it means and why it’s important 
  • Whether it should be determined by a number or mindset 
  • What a high performance mindset looks like 
  • How much a high performance team is dictated by leadership vs those within the team 
  • How team members can drive high performance culture 
  • How to deal with underperforming team members and the impact of holding on to underperformers for too long 
  • Accountability and the power of allowing your team to set their own targets 
  • The difference creating a culture that people want to be a part of makes to sales performance 
  • What can contribute to creating a positive, high-performing culture within a sales team 
  • What signs of a high performing sales team Sales Reps or Individual Contributors should be looking for when they’re looking to join a sales team 
  • What Sales Reps can do to contribute to their sales team being higher performing 
  • The core foundations that you need for building a high performance sales team 

Campaign Checklist: Getting the most out of your LinkedIn campaigns

Whether you’re new to marketing or an experienced marketeer, you need to be considering LinkedIn campaigns as a powerful tool to connect with your target audience.

We’ve created this Campaign Checklist to help you get the most out of your LinkedIn campaigns.

It covers everything from:

  • Account set up
  • Campaign set up
  • Audience
  • Bid and Budget
  • Creative
  • After the campaign launches

Learn more and read the full checklist below.

If you’d like to talk more about developing your marketing strategy and developing your brand’s authenticity, get in touch today on 0345 241 3038.