Jobs-based sales automation with Isaac Ware at UserGems

What if you could automate prospecting efforts for your sales team? UserGems' approach is based on jobs-based changes. Isaac Ware joins to share more.

Show Description

Where B2B marketers come to talk sales. 15-minute interviews published every Monday and Wednesday morning. For heads of marketing and founders who support a sales team.

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Show Notes

What if you could automate prospecting efforts for your sales team? UserGems' approach is based on jobs-based changes. Isaac Ware joins to share more.

Isaac has an extensive background in marketing and demand gen, working in a wide range of industries and spanning both agency and in-house. He's bringing all that experience to help grow UserGems.

They're taking novel approaches to help identify and create opportunities for their sales team that any B2B marketer can learn from. Think post-demo ABM-like paid media. Things like generating net new opportunities based on job changes. And even influencing buying committees.

Find Isaac Ware on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isaac-ware/ 

Learn more about UserGems: https://www.usergems.com/ 

Transcript

[00:00:00] Pipeline Meeting Intro

[00:00:00] Harris Kenny: Welcome to Pipeline Meeting where marketers come to talk about sales. I'm your host Harris, Kenny, and I'll be joined by guest every Monday and Wednesday for brief 15 minute interviews where we'll share tips that you can apply to support your sales team and help them close more deals.

[00:00:15] Harris Kenny: If you don't have time to listen to this whole episode, you can skip ahead in the show notes in your podcast player, or find the transcript at introcrm.com/podcast. All the episodes are published there.

[00:00:28] Paid media approach

[00:00:28] Isaac Ware: I joined UserGems, employee number 15 in January.

[00:00:33] Isaac Ware: We're 60 ish right now. I am heavy in paid media, so I have a agency background, lots of combination of e-comm, lead gen, b2b, b2c, really wide range. But main focus is paid media. So came in, we didn't have a paid media program running when I came.

[00:00:50] Isaac Ware: UserGems was really heavy on content, luckily. Thank goodness. I think that's every marketer's dream is to come into a team where content is primary, came first before any of the paid media. So already had pipeline through SEO, through all that. So I was able to come in and have a lot of material for paid media.

[00:01:08] Isaac Ware: We do have an interesting approach to paid media as well. obviously we have like buyer journey, we have a lot with like convo ads, we're heavy on LinkedIn. One of the main things though that's been really interesting is we use UserGems data. So we have two pieces of our product.

[00:01:22] Isaac Ware: One is contact tracking, which is job change tracking, tracking your champions, job movements so you could sell to them. Automating that repeat business, not just popping out a list, but automating the process to reach out to them again and close the deal.

[00:01:35] Isaac Ware: The other piece of it is actually surfacing buying committee into your crm. So you have this list of target accounts. We surface all your buyers based off of your definitions into your CRM.

[00:01:46] Isaac Ware: Obviously that has some major, major benefits for the sales team. There's no research or anything manual on that side for the prospecting, but on the marketing side, it allows us to do some really cool stuff with paid media.

[00:01:57] Isaac Ware: With campaigns that are open opps, we're surfacing all those buying committee at those companies that are open opps, we're able to multi-thread through paid media.

[00:02:05] Isaac Ware: If somebody opens up a deal with us, we're in the buying process, we're hitting sales, buying committee, rev ops buying committee, marketing buying committee, all with ads, letting 'em know somebody on their team's talking with us, and trying to pull them into the deal.

[00:02:17] Isaac Ware: It's been really interesting using it for that, kind of, that post demo request marketing for the sales team.

[00:02:22] Contact enrichment

[00:02:22] Harris Kenny: I wanna understand where UserGem's product sort of begins and ends here. So

[00:02:27] Isaac Ware: yes.

[00:02:29] Harris Kenny: on the receiving end. We've got a demo that came in and let's just say I've got this one point of contact. I've got it in HubSpot or whatever, you're saying UserGems is helping with rounding out, enriching that profile in the CRM as well.

[00:02:42] Harris Kenny: So I as the rep, don't need to go to Apollo or to LinkedIn or whatever and find people.

[00:02:48] Isaac Ware: Yeah. So it just shows up in your, shows up in your CRM. It's already there.

[00:02:52] Harris Kenny: Okay, cool. So that's popping in. And then is there enrichment data? You don't need to tell me like down to the exact property, but is it like name, title, email?

[00:02:58] Isaac Ware: It's name, title, email, LinkedIn profile, all the data that salesperson would need. Goes a step further as well too. Each piece of the product, job contact tracking and account tracking both have their individual use cases, but it, its really cool when you can say, okay, we just surfaced all the buying committee at this company, but on top of that, one of your previous champions from Cisco or whatever is actually at this account now.

[00:03:21] Isaac Ware: They've already bought from you. Make sure to pull them into the deal. They've already been through the buying process. They've already bought from you, so you can accelerate that deal. It's really, really cool on the sales side.

[00:03:30] Fully automated campaigns

[00:03:30] Harris Kenny: And then from a paid media perspective, you as just the person, Isaac, you have hooked up campaigns to run so that as those additional contacts come in, you are running those multi-threaded campaigns. I had a, uh, demo with the director and now you're running paid ads on LinkedIn, for example, to, of the C level people, maybe speaking at their level, explaining the importance of these tools and then maybe to lateral departments.

[00:03:55] Harris Kenny: That's all happening through. Not fully automated, but mostly automated. It sounds like.

[00:03:59] Isaac Ware: Yeah. Fully automated. I don't have any touchpoints. None of the campaigns are set up. There's a couple ways we use it too for, on the Multithreading side of things. So that opp opens up, there's a lot of personas like director of marketing, director of rev ops, head of sales, things like that, that we want them to know we're your team is talking with us about X.

[00:04:17] Isaac Ware: So they kind of have that in there. We've seen some awesome things too with that being screenshotted sent in Slack, we always get wind of those later on, kinda that dark social area that's really cool. Then we also use it on the multi-threading side of things where we wanna keep it a little more anonymous with some titles.

[00:04:32] Isaac Ware: For example, CFOs are a huge blocker. We don't necessarily want them to say or want to tell them, Hey, your team is talking with us, join this deal. We don't necessarily wanna say that. So we have a separate campaigns for personas like that where we want to social proof it. We have a lot of testimonials or customer story videos around what CFOs are saying about UserGems.

[00:04:52] Isaac Ware: For instance, we offer ROI guarantee. Really important going into 2023, having CFOs really focus on ROI. We want them to know that about UserGems before it ever comes up internally. So we can kind of break down those, those sticking points with other personas before the conversation happens internally.

[00:05:10] Sales enablement

[00:05:10] Harris Kenny: How does your sales team feel about this? I mean, I feel like a lot of sales teams would, uh, really appreciate this compared to what they're typically given, you know, which is like, Hey, here's sales navigator. Good luck, by the way, here's your quota, and if you don't hit it, you're for sure fired like I feel like the alignment between the two departments has gotta be pretty good. If you're doing all of this.

[00:05:31] Isaac Ware: There's definitely some of that going on where we actually have hires on our team. So for instance, Kristen on our team, one of our AEs, super talented. She said when she found about out about UserGems, she was willing to pay like herself. We don't sell individual licenses.

[00:05:44] Isaac Ware: She's like, it would've been worth it to me at, at my other role, just to pay for a company level subscription for myself um,, just because the ROI is so ridiculous.

[00:05:52] Isaac Ware: We have employees on the sales side that joined UserGems because it's such a powerful tool for them as an individual salesperson. And on the marketing side too, there's things that I never would've attempted to launch without the sales marketing relationship, what UserGems does for that.

[00:06:07] Isaac Ware: For instance, our ABM program, we build up to 300, 350 one to one linkedIn campaigns every single month. Every campaign is directed towards an individual company, paid media side of things that's doable. It's definitely a lot, but it's doable on that side of things.

[00:06:23] Isaac Ware: But the sales side of things gets really sticky, where it's like, okay, so now marketing says, Hey, we have these 300 accounts we're targeting on paid media. We need ADRs, BDRs, whatever you wanna call 'em on this side. Actually executing the email outreach, the calls, the LinkedIn outreach, all that good stuff on that side of things.

[00:06:42] Isaac Ware: In theory, it sounds fantastic, but then you get down to the nitty gritty of, okay, now these reps actually have to go do research for these 300 accounts. Odds of that happening and happening effectively are basically nil. So with UserGems, what it does is marketing can launch that. Those buyer personas are already queued up, ready to go through all of their automated campaigns.

[00:07:02] Isaac Ware: So we don't have to worry about sales executing the ABM portion of those campaigns. So all of all of our paid media campaigns have sister campaigns on the sales side of things, and we never have to worry about the execution happening because of the automation. Kind of removing that manual piece from the sales team.

[00:07:17] Workflows

[00:07:17] Harris Kenny: Where does this fit in the set of software that people are using these days?

[00:07:21] Isaac Ware: We are ourselves a HubSpot and Salesforce shop. We integrate really well with those. I think we use Workato to integrate with just about anything else. We have customers on dynamics, anything like that. We're a smaller team so we can integrate with a lot of stuff. We're, we're pretty agile, so yeah.

[00:07:36] Isaac Ware: and direct integrations too with, outreach Sales Loft, sales Loft, one of our customers as well, so really good tight integration with those. So all of those automated campaigns, you don't have to do all the manual action or anything to your outreach software, whatever that is, it just integrates directly and send out those emails.

[00:07:52] Isaac Ware: Some of our customers use HubSpot marketing as well for the email portion.

[00:07:55] Alternatives

[00:07:55] Harris Kenny: Yeah. Where's the friction come on? I mean, it sounds really good. Where do people hesitate?

[00:08:01] Isaac Ware: One of the interesting ones for us is actually people saying, well, we could just do this manually. And it's really interesting because a lot of our customers currently are companies that told us that in the past. So they said, oh, we're just gonna do this internally. We have this offshore team that's gonna do this.

[00:08:15] Isaac Ware: And in practice, it sounds so easy just getting to the list portion. Generating a list of job changers. A lot of companies think, oh, we could do that manually, or we can have a team outsource to do it. Things like that. So a lot of deals will get stuck on that piece where they say they can do it manually.

[00:08:31] Isaac Ware: They think they can, they go try to do it, and then they come back to us and be like, okay, that was a nightmare. Let's actually go through with this. And that's just the list portion, not even automating it to all the flows, pulling it into paid media, all that good stuff.

[00:08:43] Isaac Ware: On the post close side of things, I would say one of the, one of the sticking points is, is people that don't want to integrate with a crm.

[00:08:49] Isaac Ware: Some people wanna do this purely through CSVs makes it tough on our side, we offer ROI guarantees. So it's like we want to be able to say this ge- directly generated this, which generated X in revenue. So if you're running through CSVs, things like that, it can be hard to prove revenue. Track all these deals, everything like that. So that's a tough portion. We're definitely getting away from that piece. Making sure we're integrating with CRMs.

[00:09:11] Guaranteeing ROI

[00:09:11] Harris Kenny: And you mentioned the ROI guarantee. What does that look like? Because I think a lot of companies struggle with the offer on something like this because it can feel a little abstract. How do you make that tangible to people?

[00:09:22] Isaac Ware: UserGems isn't like a platform that everybody has to learn. We have a dashboard though, and, and part of that dashboard is showing what the ROI is directly off of revenue. It isn't like an abstract figure, a lot of marketing, attribution is tough.

[00:09:36] Isaac Ware: And this is one of the few situations where we can say, these contacts did not exist in your crm. We surfaced this job change, we executed the automated outreach to that person, this deal closed, that's revenue attributed to UserGems. And if that ROI is not hit, it's a refund.

[00:09:53] Isaac Ware: You bring up a good point, I think we just had a CFO where, um, they're like, okay, so we're, we're ready to go. But our one sticking point is, the ROI guarantee sounds way too good to be true. Like, there's no way. And it's like, well, I mean, we've, we've been doing this for a long time. We have runway. This isn't something that we're just throwing out end of quarter.

[00:10:10] Isaac Ware: Like we've, we've been doing this from the start. It's something we're willing to back it and it's that direct ROI attribution's tough with a lot of tools, but luckily we're able to do that.

[00:10:19] Use cases

[00:10:19] Harris Kenny: Yeah, interesting. What types of companies are finding success with this approach? I mean, obviously there's a lot of volatility right now in labor markets, and so you got a lot of people changing positions. It's probably creating a lot of opportunity that I feel like that entropy is good for UserGems in a sense.

[00:10:35] Harris Kenny: I mean, I'm not saying you're rooting for it, but the more changes are happening, the more value there is in following, tracking the changes, right?

[00:10:41] Isaac Ware: We have a lot with other sales tools, cybersecurity, things like that, where it's tools where once you learn them, you're a part of that ecosystem. You don't want to leave. That, really helps on the repeat business. Automating, repeat business side of things. That's been huge for us.

[00:10:55] Isaac Ware: There's also some really cool use cases too now we're seeing some of these PLG motion companies coming in where they want to be able to track, they've used it as a free tool, but they want to track, okay, did this person use it as a free tool at a non ICP company? Now they've changed jobs, they fit ICP, they're ready to bring it in.

[00:11:12] Isaac Ware: So now you can kind of add a layer to that PLG motion where yes, they've used it, weren't ready to buy, then we weren't ready to sell it to them. Then now they're at Enterprise ICP. They've used the product. They're a little bit further along. We can track that job change and surface that in. So some really interesting use cases on that side of things too.

[00:11:28] Isaac Ware: One of our customers Electric actually uses UserGems as a way for late stage, close, lost opps. So being able to say, okay, they weren't ready to buy. Let's surface these people when they're at ICP companies and push product updates to 'em.

[00:11:43] Isaac Ware: So that could be done through email, that could be done through paid media, so you can kind of stay in front of them as they move.

[00:11:48] Harris Kenny: You've mentioned using ICPs quite a bit. I'm curious how granular, in terms of best practice when you see companies taking this type of approach. How granular do they go how many points within an ICP are you looking to define in general? If someone's thinking about this, but maybe they're not ready for UserGems yet, but they're starting to think about it.

[00:12:06] Harris Kenny: Do you want industry, do you want headcounts? Do you want location? At which point do you feel like you're, you've got a good picture and you can be effective, versus like, you don't have, you don't know your customers well enough yet to use something like this. You know what?

[00:12:18] Isaac Ware: We always recommend starting very granular. We want this like when you're first rolling it out, first implementing, we really wanna focus on people that you know, are the easiest sell right off the bat. Focus in on those. So yes, industry headcount, job titles, everything like that. And then you can get a little less granular as you go along.

[00:12:38] Isaac Ware: Each one of these segments, you really wanna personalize the outreach to them. So you don't want late stage closed, lost opp, getting the same messaging as somebody who has bought at an ICP company who's moved to an ICP company.

[00:12:49] Isaac Ware: There's a lot of different messaging variations. So starting really, really granular, as granular as possible, and then expanding as you go along with the contract. So maybe after year.

[00:12:58] Customer success

[00:12:58] Harris Kenny: That makes sense to me in terms of customer success, getting outcomes, but also I feel like that's a little tough because if you start narrow and that takes a little bit of time, but you wanted to be showing wins. I know you have ROI guarantee, but how do you handle onboarding?

[00:13:11] Harris Kenny: Because I think that probably is the best. But I could also imagine some places being sort of impatient of like, well, we thought this was gonna solve all of our problems, , you know, we haven't 10 x revenue yet. Here's your gems, you let us down.

[00:13:22] Isaac Ware: We have really, really hands on approach with onboarding. We want to kind of reduce that friction with how many companies are reducing headcount. People don't have the bandwidth. That's a sticking point in a lot of sales is, okay, well we don't have a, have the bandwidth to actually launch this.

[00:13:34] Isaac Ware: So for us, it was really important for us to hire really extensive CSM team where the experience and then our rev op team is very involved either from the sales process, All the way through implementation, and typically too, implementation is a lot lighter than people expect.

[00:13:48] Following Isaac Ware

[00:13:48] Harris Kenny: Alright, someone's interested. How do they learn more about UserGems? How can they follow Isaac if they wanna see your pro tips for how you're running paid media and all these other things?

[00:13:56] Isaac Ware: Yeah, follow me on LinkedIn, Isaac Ware. If you're interested in UserGems, we're really heavy on demand gen mindset when it comes to content.

[00:14:04] Isaac Ware: So nothing's gated on our site. If you wanna check out our playbooks, how our customers are using UserGems, things like that, go to the site. Browse freely, if you're ready to do a demo request, request that demo.

[00:14:15] Isaac Ware: One thing I would recommend as well is actually going in. After that demo request.

[00:14:19] Isaac Ware: Talk to your ADR, talk to your AE about getting a data test.

[00:14:22] Isaac Ware: We do head-to-head data tests with any other provider. We show the output. We show you how many people in your CRM have changed jobs, what those percentages look like, how many people we can surface at your target accounts. So you can get a real feel for how effective UserGems would be without having to sign up or do a free trial or anything like that. So really easy way to test efficacy.

[00:14:42] Pipeline Meeting Outro

[00:14:42] Harris Kenny: That's all for now. You can find show notes at intro crm.com/podcast. The theme music for Pipeline Meeting is by Neighbourhood Vandal. If you learned something, consider sharing this show with a friend. Thanks for listening.