Overview
In this presentation, Latane Conant talks about the new wave of technology that is driving better revenue for companies. She talks about the dark funnel and how modern technology can eliminate it. Technology can also cut spam, low quality MQLs, and poor buyer experience. Latane also talks about how to create a revenue engine that creates a competitive advantage for your organization.
Speaker
Latane Conant is the CMO at 6Sense, a company focused on providing predictable revenue growth and insights to uncover potential buyers. Latane is keenly focused on leveraging data to ensure marketing programs result in deals, not just leads
Quotes
“So it’s a really fun time I think to be in sales and marketing and rev ops it is a really fun time because the technology has come so far. And there’s so much more we can do and so I believe given this major shift in technology and given this potential.”
“So ensure you have clean data at the account and contact got to provide an operating center right so we’ve got to use these models to prioritize and target the funding opportunities, make sure your data is clean, and then be able to go on fire the journeys, right, based on what’s happening.”
Key Points
- Ensure continuous innovation.
- Create partnerships and form a community.
- Develop a desire within your organization to increase revenue through tech.
Transcript
Oh, Latane Conant here chief market officer at six cents. And I’m so excited to be participating in this conference. Thank you. So much Chatfunnels for having us.
What I decided to do was we had an amazing customer conference in December 300 Plus customers together, another 1000 or so online and I put a lot of work into thinking about the revolution, the Rev tech revolution.That’s something that we thought about here at six cents is how to lead this rev tech revolution, bringing together revenue teams bringing together the best technology bringing together a unified metrics for sales, marketing, customer success and ops, bringing together a much better experience for customers and prospects. That’s what we’re all about. That’s what we’re, what we’re, you know what we’re out there doing every single day.
And so, the theme of the event was, the revolution is now and I wanted to give my perspective here on why I think the revolution is now and how you every single one of you can actually build a competitive advantage for your company, with your revenue engine, how you can be a leader how you can be someone who creates that revenue engine that thus creates a competitive advantage. So that’s what we’re going to talk about here today. The revolution is now creating a competitive advantage with your revenue, revenue engine and ultimately breaking through personally professionally and with your companies.
Why is it like I like to say now time why is it now time? Well, here’s the reality before if you go back 10 years kind of had to live in this dark funnel, right? There wasn’t great intent data. There wasn’t great company identification. There wasn’t a great way to really understand who was in market for what you were selling. So you were stuck in what we call the dark funnel at six cents and the dark funnel kind of sucks. Sucks because it requires you to do a lot of guesswork. Require sales and marketing teams to put out a lot of work, a lot of content, a lot of forms. Spend a lot of money make a lot of cold calls to try to connect within market accounts because you just don’t know you can’t see it. No one’s filling out forms on your website anymore.
So it can be very frustrating. frustrating to buyers, frustrating to sellers, frustrating the marketing teams. So it’s that form spam cold calls dark funnel world and that’s all we had to live in. Right and that’s all we had was marketing, automation, and a website. But times have changed the technology has changed dramatically. And the reality is you don’t have to live that way. There’s a volume of data and abundance of we called buyer signal because the reality is every single moment buyers are out there doing things that indicate that they’re in market we call those revenue moments are happening all the time.The technology has come far enough that you can actually see those can capture those revenue moments. The only thing is technology. has come up with to take high volumes of data all those revenue moments, your website on third party websites from your sales team partners bring that together and do pattern matching so the abundance of signal can now be brought together AI has come far enough to be able to actually scrub that data make it digestible, and then be able to recognize patterns. Is this a good customer for you? Is this the right person for you to sell to this account in market? Cool takes targeting to the next level.akes that guesswork that I talked about in the dark funnel away. Other thing that’s happened is all of these amazing engagement channels have popped up. You know life in the dark funnel. It’s pretty much email forms, you know, spam forms, cold calls. That’s all you got. Now, all of these really innovative solutions have come up to come out to help you create a much better web experience.
Things like path factory and Uber flip things like direct and qualified. Things like media fly for sales content, all these amazing technologies come onto the scene to help you create much better experiences if they can be connected, you can connect, have those channels have that pattern matching and have that volume, all that volume of data. All of a sudden you’ve uncovered your dark funnel got full visibility and you can start to generate high quality pipeline and you can start to provide an experience to customers and prospects that you can be proud of one with no forums, no spam and no cold calls on this personalized timely, right channel, great content.
So it’s a really fun time I think to be in sales and marketing and rev UPS it is a really fun time because the technology has come so far. And there’s so much more we can do and so I believe given this major shift in technology and given this potential. You and I as leaders, and as sales and marketing and revenue operation practitioners we have this huge opportunity in front of us to revolutionize sales and marketing teams create manage and convert pipeline to do that. We can do that together revolutionize how sales and marketing teams create, manage, and convert planning to revenue.
That gets me jazzed that gets me stoked. I hope it gets you stoked to and I think that if you do that, if you’re one of those people that starts doing that now, you really do revolutionize how you create, manage and convert pipeline to revenue. You’re going to have a competitive advantage. You’re going to do better than the companies that are stuck in the dark funnel, as most people are still stuck there. No 98% of marketing teams, or 98% of a marketing teams budget is spent on driving anonymous web traffic. As only 2% of buyers fill in a form. We are operating most companies are 100% operating or 98% operating in that dark fun. 70% 7% say that their last purchase is very very difficult to make delivering poor experiences. We’re making it really confusing. There’s an awesome awesome analysts from CEB now at Gartner Brent Adamson who just wrote a book called The Challenger customer and has tons of great research on this just how hard it is. b2b companies to make a decision and we’re making that works with these poor poor experiences that we’re delivering.
Most people out there fail to meet their revenue targets. Only 60% of sales reps meet their quota. That sucks like a D or an F don’t want that. We want we want our sellers meeting new targets. We want our companies meeting our revenue targets as a huge opportunity to do better. I believe this is possible arcs. I don’t believe I know. I know is possible. Because again when I kicked this presentation off well I did it for the first time I was standing up in front of an audience of all of six senses customers and I was looking out and seeing all these practitioners many of which were presenting. They’re out there doing it. Our little fan of FireEye he’s out there transforming and making sure that his sales reps hit their numbers 100% of the time.
AC carrier kazoo amazing digital experiences. Amazing personalization. Gladys Camero from Aruba. She’s not just thinking about sales and marketing transformation. She’s thinking about digital transformation, to talk about that in the presentation that she gave.We actually study our customers. We study our customers every quarter. We look at data across all of our customers to say what is happening out there. How are they transforming? Yes, what we find quarter after quarter they’re seeing two times better deal sizes two times. Two times better deal sizes 10% better conversion rates. A huge reduction in cycle times 25%. Every time you do this and every quarter the numbers are a little different. But every quarter we see much better deal sizes, much better configured conversions and much better cycle times. This is actually called the sales velocity formula and it’s fundamental for revenue generation is much more impactful than a bunch more MQLs you want to double revenue, you’d focus on these numbers and just double your MQLs.
So it’s really really exciting to see this out there. And if you want to learn more, I actually have hyperlinked the presentation so you can go straight from here. Here. Each one of these practitioners tell their story. Tell the specifics of what they did. You want to learn more about the business impact framework. You can click here. See how that framework works. You can request us to work with you and do a customized version for you. Like what what can your sales velocity formula so it’s there, it’s out there. It’s not that I believe I know I know it’s happening.
But it’s gonna take work. It’s gonna take work to create a competitive advantage with our revenue engine. And I think three things have to happen. create and maintain just because you have it doesn’t mean you’re going to maintain it. It’s going to take work, create and maintain a revenue engine that is a competitive advantage. One continued technology innovation, and I’m going to tell you about that, two partnerships and community. It takes a village and three there’s something that you’ve got to do on your own. So let’s get into it. So what do I mean by continued innovation? I talked about that big shifts that had happened right dark funnel versus having your funnel lit up. All the channels available the AI pattern matching we have to continue to deliver and, and, and and continue to innovate and I think the things that need to happen to make sure that each one of you can have that competitive advantage is the first is around capturing revenue moments. It’s critical that technology continue to think about how to help you capture as many revenue moments as possible.
hird party intent, but I call second party intent, which is like a Jeetu or trust radius for first party intent. That’s who’s on your website. Techno graphics are some think about an ecosystem by right if someone buys something that could be an indicator.They’re gonna buy your platform or need your services. You need to have the most robust capability to capture every single one of those moments and make sure that you never miss a revenue moment.That’s something that we have success obsess over for our customers and for the market sustainability.
The second thing that has to happen and continue happening is it’s one thing to take in all of these revenue moments. Great. Someone’s researching on Jeetu. Okay, someone was on my website. Okay, someone’s doing third party research. Right? Someone just bought Salesforce CRM, what does it mean? It’s too much for one human to take in and digest and really start to see the patterns.
So it’s critical that we continue to evolve on our AI differentiation at six cents, so that we can continue to give you models to prioritize the moments that are going to yield revenue opportunities. Advertise accounts and market prior to prioritize accounts that are the right fit. Prioritize the channel this the right fit sure you have clean data.Only 10% of sales and marketing teams feel they have good data. So a big part of the innovation that has to happen to take an account that’s in market and make sure that you have a 360 degree view of that account and it gets added to your CRM and you have the contact data. Just because of accounts in market you haven’t contacted anybody who isn’t market who’s doing research.
So ensure you have clean data at the account and contact got to provide an operating center right so we’ve got to use these models to prioritize and target the funding opportunities, make sure your data is clean, and then be able to go on fire the journeys, right, based on what’s happening. That’s critical. That’s the pillar that we call target revenue opportunities, help you capture the moments but then you got to go and target.
Third, which is really the outcome that we want is we want better performance, we want to boost performance. Performance is the ultimate, you know, indication of the revenue engine, did we boost your revenue performance? And how do we do that? We’re going to make sure every single channel is connected. Chat, your website your sales engagement platform, your advertising, sales enablement, all your content connected with one brain that’s tied to that data. So that every single channel actually performs better is boosted because it’s personalized as firing at the right time. We’re going to coordinate sales and marketing activities. I know this sounds like Nirvana right? Oh my gosh, sales and marketing. We’re going to get along we’re going to be coordinated.
That we’re going to use data to know who’s doing what when to make sure our sellers have rich insights to boost their performance so they’re not wasting their time. They know who to call when to call what to talk about. And then we’re gonna have a great feedback loop. People always ask me about attribution and my thought on it and my thought is, I just want a feedback loop. I want to know what’s working. I want to know what’s not working. That’s how you boost your performance. I want to know if we’re gonna hit our pipeline or not, and not after the quarter is over. I want to know as the quarter progresses, so I can go and do something I want to forecast. That’s that’s what we think about and those are the things that you should expect from a technology partner when it comes to boosting performance.
So yes, there’s been a ton of innovation. There’s a ton more and I think to really capitalize you have to capture revenue moments, target revenue opportunities and boost revenue performance, and have technology that allows you to do that better than anybody else. And so, you know, rather than talking kind of platitudes, I always love a day in the life. I think it’s so helpful to bring these concepts to life. So I’m going to walk you through what I mean by that. Let’s take this thing for a spin. So this is a real example. You know, we know for us that if you are using a sales engagement platform and you marry that, with the Sixth Cents platform, like amazing things happen. You get amazing results. We know you’re going to probably buy success if you already have a sales engagement platform.
We’ve looked at our data 90% of our stage one accounts, moved to stage two if they’re using outreach or sales loft. So what what a great indicator that that’s a good that’s that’s a revenue moment for us. Someone’s on sales after outreach or about divide. So we said all right, we’re gonna run a play. We want to pick up more pipeline and enterprise new business. And so we’re gonna we’re gonna look at revenue moments. that have to do with sales engagement platforms. So what we’re able to do is essentially do just that. We could we could find all of the companies that were researching keywords related to ABM. Or sales, engagement platforms and integration and acceleration. They could use in intent data. We have a company called slim towel that we bought, and it has Technographics but it actually has propensity to buy and it has a renewal data and turn data. We could go and call and see, hey, who’s about to buy a sales engagement platform who already has a sales mutual trust, radius and Jeetu.
Let’s bring in people researching those engagement platforms. We have six signal we’ve got pages. Let’s see who’s going to those pages, six cents and sales engagement platforms. crossbeam awesome solution. Looks at our pipeline in our partners pipeline. We can bring that in. That’s a good revenue moment. And then of course, you know, looking at Marketo and Salesforce, we’re doing campaigns about sales engagement platforms, who’s responding. So this is an example of how for one campaign in a couple clicks, we can create a segment that captures all of these revenue moments. Pretty cool. That’s step one.
Step two is targeting them, right. So great that we have all of these where are they? Where are these accounts in their journey? How many of them you know, are really ready to engage and how many maybe not so much. And so based on this, this is telling us that there’s 51, then it’s go time, there’s 453 and decision we probably need to warm up, etc, etc. So we’re looking at this and this helps us start to design our plates. Also, what’s important is do we have to eat out and all those accounts are great that we have a segment of 1000s of pounds that we want to go target but because you have the account name, you have nothing. We have to get those buying centers flushed out with contacts, and we have to get those accounts added to CRM. And so these are these always on data orchestrations, that my team can run very easily in six cents on the segment say, You know what? Let’s make sure for this segment, everything’s fresh and ready to go so we can target those revenue opportunities.
And then it’s time to orchestrate what do we want to do? And how do we want to engage? So we’re going to build easy flows to say, You know what, if an accounts in target, we just want to get them to our website. So we’re going to do an AI orchestration. I’m just going to tell success. You know what, figure out how to get into our website and the AI is going to pick the ads. The AI is going to go out to target those accounts with the goal of getting them to our website. You know, when they’re in awareness, I’m going to start my own stage based display. I’m also going to start social so I’m going to start Facebook. I’m going to start a persona based nurture, firing from Marketo. Account moves. And again, this is happening totally dynamically all the time. So if an account was in awareness, this is the stuff they’re going to get. If the account moves to consideration, something different is going to happen.
The ads are just to adjust. They’re going to just Dan’s going to start and we’re going to expand the persona based nurture to more personas. Now the account moves to decision. Again, dynamically all set up, just happens. Six QA dashboards. So the dashboards that our sellers and our BDR you uses are going to light up and say this account is ready. It’s ready for outreach. It’s ready for you to go and prospect. We’re going to also automate some of the outreach we have been to use sales loft for ourselves. And we want to make sure that every single time an account is in market we never ever, ever miss hitting it at the right time. We’ve set up an automation this runs make sure at the right time those accounts get hit. Then we find this is a great time for direct gifting, counts ready to buy. We haven’t gotten a meeting. We’re going to go ahead and send an Alice gift for those 51 accounts that are in in purchase probably gotten a meeting are worth getting. So guess what, you never get a second chance for a first impression. So our AES are using success to know that this these accounts have sales engagement platforms. They know which personas to go deeper on they know the keywords they’re researching. They know the content they’ve consumed, and they have recommended talking points to make sure that that first meeting goes absolutely fabulously. So this all gets set up. We haven’t executed anything set up with a couple clicks. That it just happens. Just happen. So when we come to boost, this is when the action starts to come alive. And so let me walk you through what that setup looks like. Because we’ve captured the revenue moment. We targeted the revenue opportunities.
So here’s our relevant always on ad campaigns by buying stage seed. So again, this is SalesLoft plus six cents. Here’s our landing page, personalized by the campaign and the UTM SalesLoft and six cents content check it out. Demo topic base retargeting, hopefully they came to our website, right? We ran a play to drive web engagement. We want to get them back. We want to retarget with a consistent message and landing page continues to get personalized based on where they’ve been what they’ve already seen. Personalization when they return, right, we want to get them back. So we’re going to make sure that we give personalized for the for what they’ve already looked at. Chat ready to go. Here we go. It’s not just a random chat. It’s six cents and SalesLoft because we know these accounts are on SalesLoft.
hese are those persona based emails so the one to their BDR team is from earnest RBDR leader. The one to their marketing ops leader is from Chris, our marketing ops leader. Because we can get that data we can get that role based data and contacts to be able to execute these persona based nurtures. The content is going to be highly curated. So depending on you know what they’ve seen what they’ve consumed, it’s going to be curated. We’re going to give them case studies about success and SalesLoft. We’re going to give them videos of success in Salesforce.
And again, here’s I told you about those six key ways which is a six ounce qualified account indicating that sales needs to make outreach. This is going to be right when they log in. That’s what you’re looking at on the right soon as they log in, here’s their hot accounts to go reach out to one Q one flow. You don’t have to train them on at train meteors and salespeople on every campaign you’re running. Everything comes into one place for them to make sure that no balls get dropped. Because they have this rich data, they’re going to do personalized and timely relevant outreach that actually generates meetings. They’re going to make a personal connection, using the data using psychographic data, using market insights using the technographic data that we talked about. Using keyword data. They’re gonna know the next best action that they need to take. We know it’s not going to take one action. We actually have an AI algorithm that tells sellers have they done enough outreach. That’s pretty important. It’s not going to take one email. It’s going to take a full sequence or cadence.
And we’re gonna make sure that your sellers performance is boosted because we’re indicating the best things to do when and if they’ve done enough activity. And then we’re gonna look Is this working? And what tactics actually worked so our segment performance is going to show what how did accounts engage what drove engagement. How did these accounts progress over the campaign? And then we’re going to get to see which is this is my favorite graph which is the one on the right, pipeline.
This is this campaign going to result in a pipeline for us to hit our revenue goals. If not, I better fire up two or three more. So this is forecasting projecting, where we’ll end up not just reacting to where we were critical critical for marketing marketers. So hopefully, that got your wheel spinning. Hopefully you’re thinking oh my gosh, there’s a lot that’s possible. I see how these people are really creating a competitive advantage.
The technology has come a long way and it’s going to keep coming a long way. And that’s my commitment to you. And to the red tech revolutions of six cents will continue to lead and continue to innovate. But we got to also work together. And in working together, it’s about partnership and it’s about community you know, don’t try to do this alone. There’s no sense it’s too hard to do alone. Partner up get in the flow with other like minded people, you know, and transformation as people process and technology and my first sentence was we have the opportunity to transform sales and marketing teams create, manage and convert pipeline to revenue. So that is what I’m talking about.
I happen to write a book on this transformation. It’s kind of a playbook. I spill a lot of beans on what’s worked for us and what hasn’t worked for us so love to give you a copy. There’s a link, you can get a property. You can actually get certified in a lot of the practices and the teachings in the book. And what’s cool about the certification process is you don’t just do it on your own. Do it with a group. Do it with a cohort of other people trying to do the same thing. So you get connected, get connected to others working through the same thing to help share knowledge.
Communities are huge. When we do is hard. What we do changes often, the technology is changing often, the role is changing often. The only way to stay in touch is to find people in the same place. As you are connect, share, find your tribe. It’s been so meaningful to me to have a group of CMOS scaling companies the way I am fighting the fight the way I am. And so you know, I’d love to have new invite you if you’re a CMO to join our CMO community. I’d love to invite your your CRO join our CRO community.
Just a great way it’s like an it’s like the MBA that I never got. I’m getting every single week with this community. I talked about the business impact report that we do for our customers we go for prospects so let’s find out. Let’s figure out what’s at stake. Doing this for our health. What’s the business impact we can have through this transformation? Start small.
One of my favorite songs is Michael Ferrante think big start small and and you got to you got to do that. Like I’m we’re thinking big but start small. And you can start small with an in market demand report. That’s something that we’ll send you every week. Just starting to tell you who’s in market, just starting to capture some of those revenue moments for you and your team. Again linked here if that’s something you’re interested in.
And then the last thing when it comes to like partnership and community and transformation is is mapping your use cases. One of the things that we do during our deployment process with customers is we look at their organization. And we look at each major pillar. We map their use cases. So think of that is there from two you used to prospect off the list. Now you’re going to prospect in real time, based on who’s in market. So that use cases called proactive Truxton. Prospecting you use to advertise in all these different silos and not have a unified view. That’s your digital marketer. We’re going to bring that all together. So we’re gonna have a unified digital marketing hub. That’s a use case.
So it’s really important, I think, to really think through with a partner. Those key aspects of your team, the use cases that you want them to adopt, and then how how that’s going to change what they’re from to and what the impact is going to be. Just to get that map going. Again, that’s kind of your walking around document. Just because you have the technology that doesn’t mean anything. You got to really understand the processes that you want to go and impact. So six things that you can do right now in partnership with us. We’re happy to help you outside of technology to really drive that transformation. So we’ve talked about what six cents in the technology needs to do. For the revtech revolution, talked about what we can do together, brainstorm some ideas of what we can do together but there’s one thing is last thing you got to do on your own.
You have a saying in our house called you gotta wanna that’s my husband and my two boys. And here’s the thing can buy Catesby, the fanciest soccer shoes and get them a new soccer ball? I can get him one on one training and coaching I can sign him up for another camp. But if he doesn’t really want to play soccer, I don’t really eat into it. Doesn’t matter. It’s a waste. He’s got a water. Now I can and the same goes for Watson. I can get him every tutor if he doesn’t want to learn Spanish I can get him every you know, Rosetta Stone, every tape. enroll him in every class. He’s gonna wanna, it’s gonna want to speak Spanish. So my husband and I have this phrase that’s one of our family phrases. Hey, you gotta wanna I think that’s true.
We’re technology is there. I walked you through it. You don’t have to live in our funnel. The technology is advanced. That plenty of technology the proof points are everywhere. You know, I told you about some of ours from the business impact framework. I invited you to listen to some of our case studies but maybe you don’t don’t believe me, Lee Forbes. Um, you know, business that prioritize customer experience of a revenue increase of four to 8% higher than their competitor. 8% increase in revenue that focus on improving customer experience. So many, so many proof points about focusing on this. This is what we wrote the book about no farms, no spam, no cold calls, putting prospects and customers in the center of the experience. So the proof points are everywhere.
The technology is there. But you’ve got to want to change the game. I don’t want to change the game forever. You gotta want to create that competitive advantage. And it’s a lot of fun. I’m having a time in my life. I can tell you that and and I know a lot of our customers are and I would welcome the opportunity to to commit with you to change the game. So feel free to reach out to
me. Let me Conant I’m on LinkedIn. Love to get to know you feel free to follow six cents. I hope you want to. I hope you want to commit to changing the game. Thank you