Speaker 0: Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much for attending MarDreamin. I’m super excited to be with you all today. We are gonna talk about in this next session, BDRs as catalysts, really thinking about how we at Sandler found our key to sales and marketing synergy, also known as sales and marketing alignment. As you can see here, I am Emily Regia. I am the Sandler Enterprise Marketing Director, and I’ve been with the company about four years now. I bring quite a story and quite an array of experiences to share with you all, and I hope will be helpful for all of you as you look at your businesses and how your teams are structured, and hopefully can find alignment in your worlds as well. Now before we get started here today, I did wanna give a huge thank you to all the event sponsors. These guys are the real heroes of the event and all the content you are seeing here today. So huge shout out to each and every one of them here and looking forward to sharing some great insights that hopefully make them proud as well. As we get started, I want everyone to just pause for a moment and reflect on this question. Is your organization experiencing any marketing and sales misalignment? Now when we think about this, it’s not something that is unique to any industry, any organization, regardless of size. This is quite a common pain point for a lot of companies out there. For us at Sandler, we had experienced this, I would say, for the past few years. Ultimately, we started to want to try and unearth the why. Why is this such a struggle for so many organizations? Then really reflect inwards at our own teams and our own structure and think about why we were experiencing misalignment within Sandler. Now for us, where that search led us is to the actual structure of our teams today. When we think about sales and marketing, we obviously think of them as two separate departments, two separate units. And when we look at the sales structure, many companies across the board, not just Sandler, but us included, I will say, is they all have what we would call the model in front of you, the traditional model. Now, if you look closely at this model here today, you’ll see that there are three tiers. The top tier is our sales leaders. Now, they’re usually focused on organizational growth and those high level revenue targets and meeting those goals to really keep the company growing year over year. Now that middle tier is what we would call our actual sellers. These sales VPs, or sometimes known as other job titles, are the ones usually handling the bulk of the sales at your company. These are sometimes the ones who go out there and are on-site, really have those intimate relationships with the clients. Sometimes, whether or not you have a customer success team or not, they’re also playing a major role in the retention of clients as well. As you look down at that bottom tier, you’ll see our BDRs. Now our BDRs, we feel wear a lot of different hats. Yes. They’re the ones usually qualifying leads and sort of doing the gatekeeping for anything that comes upwards to the sales team, but sometimes they’re also assisting the sales team with different roles and different outreach efforts. Sometimes they’re helping with a presentation, a project. Sometimes, you know, if there isn’t someone to help enable the team on certain tools, certain platforms, that’s oftentimes where the BDR step in. Now, when we look at this traditional model and we’re looking at it from the marketing lens, it can be hard sometimes for us to know where best to send our leads when we bring them in through our campaigns and efforts. Do they go directly to the sales VP’s? Should all of them go to the BDRs? Should we split that? It gets very complicated. As I outlined, each different tier on this screen has a different goal, has different KPIs that they’re tracking to. So it can be hard on top of all their individual roles require of them to then factor in any sort of marketing leads that are coming into the organization as well. So as we think about what is the key to solving that sales and marketing alignment, we’re gonna think a little bit about how we can tweak this traditional model and make some positive changes that can really fix some of that friction. Now what are some of those common challenges that we were experiencing, those symptoms, if you will? So as we sort of explain, there’s conflicting goals and metrics that we’re all tracking to. We’re all sometimes looking at, you know, where’s the attribution for both teams, but ultimately, it’s a struggle because each one of us have different daily activities and goals in mind that we’re trying to meet. Then I would also say for us on the marketing side, we were struggling with feeling like our campaign efforts and resources were being wasted. We would bring in leads, sometimes we would get them over to sales, sometimes we would get some feedback on them, but not always. It was a broken process and it made it hard for us to really optimize what we were doing and bring in better quality for our sales team. And then lastly, we were really seeing some poor lead quality and conversion efforts. Again, we didn’t really have a solid feedback loop coming back to us because there were so many other priorities for our sales team members and on their plates that sometimes they couldn’t get to our marketing leads. Any feedback was splintered and broken, and it made it hard to know what was converting and how to replicate when those leads did go through and succeed. Now, as we think about those models that we just explored, what if I told you that by making one simple change to that structure, synergy is possible. Now when we look at our organizations, I like to quote one of my favorite people who is also a business owner, Ryan Reynolds, who said, “You’d be hard pressed to find more drama in Days of Our Lives than you do in an average job each day.” How many of you can relate to that feeling where you come into work and it feels like a soap opera every day? There’s so many different activities going on all at once. Priorities are scattered. It’s hard to meet in the middle and collaborate best when there’s a misunderstanding of what’s on the table for each group and figuring out how we can collectively work together towards a solution. As we think about what is that one shift we can make, well, I’ll tell you the key for us to really solving that challenge of misalignment was shifting the BDRs underneath the marketing umbrella. Now, what does that even look like, you may ask. We looked at that traditional model, but how does that shake out when we think about a new model, a new structure for the team? I give you this new approach in this graphic right here. Now, what you’ll notice is we now have worked in the marketing team to this structure. Now, sales and marketing truly are connected and working together. What you’ll see here is at the left hand side of your screen, there’s the marketing team. We’re doing all of the campaigns at the top of the funnel, bringing them in, nurturing them, all the way to the point where they become a marketing qualified lead. At that point, we are then working closely with our BDRs who are then in the middle of this structure here. We’ve really polished up this handoff process and we’ve really defined that the goals and the role and responsibility of our BDRs is to serve as those gatekeepers that every day those marketing qualified leads that come down the funnel, that is their main priority to work them and give us feedback. And then as you look towards the far right hand side of this structure, that’s where we have our sales team. Now this feels a little bit more like we’re connecting the dots. We have a marketing qualified lead come in, We’re giving that history and that customer or potential customer, I should say, to our BDRs. They’re getting the full picture of what this person has experienced up to that point. And then once they’ve been qualified by someone in sales, our BDRs, they are then passed to an actual seller to complete that opportunity and close that deal. So this is really a great way to bridge that gap between both worlds because we’re letting the BDRs continue to do what they do best in qualifying leads. Sales feels like they’re getting a win because they’re getting the best of the best leads and they know that someone with a sales mind has looked at them, and we’re now getting feedback sometimes on a daily basis from our BDRs regarding the quality of the leads that are coming in. We’re able to optimize our campaigns and replicate those successes moving forward. Now I know what some of you might be thinking at this point, that you might be experiencing some reservations, and I will be honest and say that we too heard some pushback when we initially rolled out this idea. So let’s go ahead and debunk a few of these common misconceptions together. Think of these as something you might hear if you presented this at, like, a board meeting or a leadership meeting. These are some reservations you might hear from those in the room. First and foremost was marketing doesn’t understand sales. Now, we know that this is quite a common misconception because the reality is marketing and sales often have shared goals. We have more in common than we do different, and we work a lot stronger together. I always give the analogy that when it comes to something like wrestling, tag teams always perform better because they have a partner, because they have somebody who they can tap into and access that strength when it’s needed most. For us, we can bring in leads, but we can’t close the deal. For sales, they can close the deals, but they don’t focus on the campaigns that bring in the leads. We work much stronger together and when we’re having those collaboration meetings each day and talking and communicating more than ever. The second misconception that we saw and heard from some of our team members was, well, marketing will just embellish the BDR conversion data. For us, this actually did make us laugh a little bit because the reality here is we’re very committed to data integrity. We want to be transparent. We want to be authentic. We want to be real with the numbers we’re presenting, good or bad. It was very humbling for us to work with the BDRs that first quarter and see that a lot of our leads weren’t good quality. But we needed to hear that so we could make changes at the top to our campaigns and our strategy and our tactics so that we could fix those issues. We could start bringing in better quality leads. It’s a really great feeling when you feel like you’re starting to hear that feedback, they feel heard, You feel like you’re seeing positive changes go through. You’re starting to see real leads make it from the top of the funnel down to the deals and they’re closing. So even in those cases, it’s critical that we’re being honest with ourselves about the data and more transparent than ever. The next misconception that we heard was, well, marketing is just going to ruin the order of operations. For us, the challenge with this was, well, actually, operations is already a little broken. That’s okay. As long as we can admit that to ourselves, we can now take steps to change that, to fix that. We’re very committed in the marketing side to streamlining. We understand that there are a multitude of priorities and activities expected of both teams, both sales and marketing. So how do we really maximize our time and our efforts and be efficient? That’s something that we strive for. Working closely with the BDRs really gave us that insight into what a day in the life looks like. We were able to find those opportunities to really be more efficient, to automate things, and to make sure that handoff was truly seamless. Then the last misconception that we’ve heard, the most common I will say is, well, there’s just no way that BDRs will embrace marketing. There is a little bit of truth to that. Of course, BDRs come from the sales minded world and the sales team is truly their team at heart. But what we actually found is when we looked back at that traditional model, there was a little bit of a gap that we observed. We see at the top tier of this traditional model, that’s where leadership is. Again, they’re focused very high level, looking at the overall team’s performance, looking at what’s going in as actual deals closed, and trying to scale their organization. Sometimes it’s hard for them to reach down past that second tier, past those sellers, and really spend that dedicated time that’s needed with the BDRs to shape out their role, give them structure, give them those priorities. We actually found that when we did bring the BDRs under our wing, there was this element of nurturing to it that we were able to set those boundaries for them and give them structure like they had never had before, and that was something that they told us they really appreciated. So as we look again at this new approach, we’re really giving ownership and definition to each one of our roles in this overarching funnel, that each one of us play a critical role in bringing a customer all the way from the beginning of their journey with us, all the way down to the point where they close a deal, they become a new customer with us, and we’re keeping that journey very consistent and the handoff is more seamless. Their experience is overall better with us and it’s accelerated and it’s just a cleaner process overall. Now, let’s think about you all at your organizations. We’ve done a little bit of a case study of Sandler, but how do you all unlock sales and marketing alignment at your organization? What we’re going to do for the next few minutes here is we’re going to discuss how to decide if your organization should make this shift, how to then, if you do make this shift, enhance the role of a BDR under that marketing wing, Then think about how you guys can align these strategies within your CRM to really make sure that you’re leveraging your technology, your tools, and your platforms to maximize performance and make sure that you’re putting out the most your team can and using those tools to help you. Then lastly, how do you evaluate and measure whether this is successful? How do you optimize your efforts if it is successful? Let’s go down those paths here for a moment. Step one, really for us, it started with investigating. You have to be honest with yourself and you have to take a walk in your BDR shoes. You have to think about what a day in the life really looks like for them. How long does it take them to do what they do from starting the day hunting, whether it’s using ZoomInfo or Salesforce or different buyer intent data signals, and really starting to think about what it takes for them to bring someone in from an outbound standpoint and an inbound standpoint and execute upon them properly. That was quite a humbling process for us because it kind of gave us insight into their pain points, what they were experiencing, how hard their job is. But then on the flip side, having that insight, we were able to implement some positive changes for them. The goal of walking in their shoes is to really understand what is working today, what’s not working today, what’s being measured, and what’s currently not being measured. Then lastly, what can be automated and what should remain manual so that there can be a more personalized experience. For you all here today, I did want to give you a little bit of a goodie. If you scan the QR code on the page here, this is what we call our ultimate investigation checklist. This is free to you. There’s no form fills, nothing like that. But basically, it’s a one sheeter that asks you a series of questions and it gives you a chance to be honest with yourself, reflect on your organization, and see whether or not this new structure, this new approach might be a fit for you. We hope that you’ll take a look at that and I hope it does help. Then the next step for us was enhancing. Thinking about what do the BDRs currently do? Again, if we think back to that traditional model, they were wearing multiple hats. Sometimes their days looked very, very different depending on what the priorities were, who was driving the ship for them, and determining what should be top of mind for them. Really giving them a chance to shine by thinking about what their role should be. That started for us with ownership. We think about that new approach model that we showed you and really letting them own the middle of funnel. Really own being the gatekeepers and the qualifiers of those MQLs and letting them take charge of that aspect of lead generation. And then secondly, assurance. I think there’s sometimes a little bit of fear when you bring BDRs under your wing that suddenly they’re gonna be responsible for lead quality. And nothing could have been further from the truth for us. Um, honestly, we just wanted to hear any feedback. So the good, the bad, the ugly, whatever it was, it it’s really important that you reassure them that they are not responsible for what comes in. They’re just responsible for working it and giving us positive and, I would say, honest feedback about what we can do to better what’s coming in the door. And then lastly, partnership. So really going all in on this together. So setting up those team goals, making them feel like they’re part of your group and that we are in need of each other to really succeed and showing them that this is their new home and we want them to be successful alongside us. Really thinking about what does this look like overall, it’s shifting basically. Shifting them from just being reactive to where are my leads or what’s the next project I need to work on under sales to proactive. They know their role, they’re owning it, and they’re being more proactive with lead gen than ever. Thinking more about, you know, how can we expand them from just being inbound focused to maybe looking outbound as well and really shaping them to be hunters for our organization in addition to working what’s coming in. And then lastly, shifting them from that combative, fearful mindset to collaborative, that we’re not enemies, we’re friends, and we’re working on this together, we succeed and are a lot more successful together. So then we think about how do you implement this. For us, this really comes down to leveraging the power of your CRM. Now, I know a lot of you here use different CRMs, but this is pretty agnostic to any system that you have. It really starts with outlining a process. When we think about lead quality, for us, it meant scoring. Really making sure that we defined clearly what an MQL was. For us, it was a score of 50 to show that someone was engaged enough to kind of merit further outreach and conversation, and automating a workflow that sort of said, okay, once someone reaches that threshold, we’re going to then rotate an owner to them from our BDR team and that BDR is going to get assigned a task and get a notification. It just gives them a little bit clearer guidelines on how they know when someone’s assigned to them and what steps to take to work that lead. Then for us, it also helped to have these dashboards that were specifically for prospecting. Now, you can shape this any way you want for your organization. But for us, the goal was to get an overarching look at what that day in the life looks like for our BDR. Understanding how many tasks they have on their plate, how many leads are working, how many meetings they’re having. This just gives us a sense of whether or not the volume is there to keep them going, whether or not we need to increase that volume or make changes to help them better use their time and maximize their performance. Then for us, thinking about sequences or those automated messages you can sort of send out to different prospects. And what we decided to do was create these different flows based on one property and for us that was lead status. So Depending what that lead status was marked as by our BDR, we wanted to make sure that we were nurturing people with a lot more customized messages, making sure that it fit well with where they were in their journey with us, making sure it felt relevant and timely for them. So I encourage you to kind of give your BDRs that room to experiment with different messaging and to personalize messages because we know that goes a long way. When we think about implementing those effective sequences, they’re going to take shape in a lot of different ways. They don’t necessarily need to just be emails. We know that multi threading and multi touch is very important. Making sure that we are, yes, using tokens and personalization keys to kind of make that possible, that we’re also using video tools and video messages, and thinking about, you know, is there an opportunity to message them on LinkedIn? Maybe send them a connection request? Really using all of that to your advantage to make sure that your BDRs are set up for success. Again, we did want to give you all here another goodie. For us, we wanted to share some of our sequences that have worked best for us because these are the ones that have had the best open rates, the best click through rates, and we’ve seen consistently the engagement be very, very strong month over month. I did include another QR code here for you. These are the sequences that have worked well for us. You can see the structure, the topics we cover, things like that, and hopefully apply some of those pieces to your business to help you and your BDRs be more successful in that prospecting efforts. Then for us too, the last thing I’ll say is that feedback loop piece. So for us on the marketing side, I think that was the biggest frustration that we wanted to do right by sales, but we weren’t getting any feedback. And for us to really establish an effective feedback loop and one that was realistic for our BDRs to follow day over day, we had to keep it simple. So I encourage you that if you wanna keep this simple in your CRM, only pick three to four maximum properties to kind of give you that feedback you need at the marketing level to then tweak and optimize any campaigns. For us, for example, here, we have Lead Status. As you saw on a few slides ago, lead status is going to indicate what path or what series of messages they get. But it’s also going to inform us what’s going on with that lead and where they are in their journey. Lifecycle stage, very simple. But for us, if it stays in MQL, we know that it’s still being worked and it still needs a little bit more time to cook versus if it becomes an SQL, we know that there was a discovery call that was successful and it was handed off to a sales VP to work on an actual deal. As you can see here, discovery call, if, for instance, we do see that there is this timestamp on the discovery call date and we’ve seen that happen, We know that there was a good quality lead that came in. If it merited a call, we know that that was one that really had the quality necessary to potentially move down our pipeline. So we then wanna take that and, on the marketing side, use that for our retargeting efforts and try to replicate that process that brought those types of leads in in the first place. Then company owner, that just lets us know where someone is today who’s owning that relationship and helps us keep an eye on whether or not that does close or not eventually as time goes on. Then last step here is Measure. We’ve talked about all these different tactics, all these different ways to look at this strategically, but I think the most critical thing we would encourage you to do when you do implement this model is take time after two-three months and just measure. See what success you’ve had, see if there’s been growth, see what changes have taken place, and really look for ways that you can continue to grow and optimize this new approach. Now, I like giving real numbers because people will often say, okay, that’s great. That sounds all warm and fuzzy, but did this actually work for you? The proof is in the data. What you can see here are real numbers. This would have been from January to August 2024 because we first implemented this model at the beginning of this year. We’re talking seven or eight months here of implementing this new structure, and these are the real results. We have seen an 80% increase in marketing pipeline attribution. If you think about your whole pipeline today as a pie, the wedge that is the biggest now is marketing because we are able to track leads that come in at the top, get sent to our BDRs, further qualified, and end up in the hands of sales becoming part of the pipeline. An 80% increase is huge. So that is a huge step in the right direction. And then I would also say a 60% increase in MQL to SQL conversions. That’s unheard of. We used to see leads sit in MQL status forever, and we didn’t know if they had gone to die there or if they were just lost in the dark or the abyss. But seeing actual MQL to SQL conversions increase significantly, it not only gave us hope in that we were bringing in better quality leads over time, but it also made sales more trusting of the leads that marketing was handing over to them. Then we also saw that 67% increase in SQLs per month. The number of leads that were being passed to the BDRs then to a salesperson increased by 67%. That is no joke and that is huge because we, again, oftentimes we’re seeing this distrust between both our teams. They felt like we weren’t qualifying folks enough. They were worried that our scoring was a little bit too basic for someone to really understand whether or not there was a need. But having those BDRs fill that gap, we know that a sales minded person had a conversation and gave their stamp of approval that this was a quality lead worth focusing their time on. And then for us, as of the August, we had a $6,800,000 active pipeline attributed to our combined marketing and BDR efforts. Again, that stronger together mindset turned into real pipeline. Lastly, getting that full visibility to our customer journey and getting it consistently has been super helpful for us in knowing the best ways to reach our customers, the most relevant content to deliver to them. Not only are we having a better experience internally, but our customers are having a much more cohesive experience externally and feeling like they’re learning the story of Sandler from start to finish as they work down the funnel and become ultimately new customers. When we think then about what’s a realistic timeline or expectation of timing to roll something like this out, I did want to be very straightforward with everyone here. What we put here on this slide was a month over month view of what this could look like for rollout. As you can see, just because it may take six months or so to get off the ground, doesn’t mean that you’re not growing and still contributing to the pipeline incrementally during each month. Even as this took us six months to really refine and work out the kinks, by month three, we could still track that we had $3,200,000.0 in pipeline attribution to our efforts, and then that significantly doubled by the time we got to month six. And you can see there that