Video: 6sense Presents: Scaling Account Follow-Up with AI | Duration: 1756s | Summary: 6sense Presents: Scaling Account Follow-Up with AI

Transcript for "6sense Presents: Scaling Account Follow-Up with AI": Welcome. Welcome, everyone. How y'all doing? I will say, this conversation will be extremely lively. Michael, thanks for joining. So before we get started, I do wanna start with an icebreaker. And I think in in the, theme of this chat today, I actually use chat GB to find this icebreaker. So please throw in the chat. Michael, I'd love to hear your answer as well. But what is the hardest or most, traumatizing reply all mishap that you've had? Michael, I'll start with you. Oh, god. Alright. I don't tell anybody this story. This is just between us, right, on this call. Yeah. Early in my career, I remember doing a reply all. I was in my car, and I was fired up about it was actually about lead qualification that how IQ this this executive would not know what they're doing and that was all the fun to go ahead. I don't know what they're doing and these are the steps of the process and calling people out by name Sid, I felt good walking to the office and I had one of those, Michael, you know, come into my office. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to the office And then I was told what happened. I oh, man. I felt horrible. I've never this was early days of my career where I learned ever since do not reply all without checking everybody in the reply. Oh, yeah. How about you, man? That that's tough. That's tough. So mine's mine is a reply to all, it was emailed to a lot of people, but I think the biggest mistake I made with this, and this is like really embarrassing, but again, similar to you early in my career, there's actually someone on our team that we're about to exit from the org and she had the exact same name as someone on our people team. So when I was replying to the email, I replaced her name with the person the people the people person's name with the person that we're about to let go. And she's on the thread where we had everything laid out of what was actually gonna happen. So that was really bad. And I really hope for all of you, please take this seriously from Michael and I Love to hear the chat as well what you all have done. If you're ever gonna talk about stuff that are private and sensitive, please please please do it in person or not through reply on the email. Okay. So without further ado, let's let's get things started. Let me share my screen and what we got today. Okay. So for today's conversation, we will be talking about scaling your account follow-up with AI, and I will introduce myself and my Google Next, but my name is Ernest Owusu. I'm senior director of sales at 6¢. I guess my background is I've been at 6¢ for almost 5 actually over 5 years now. So I was there in the early days with built and scaled our SDR team, and I think one thing I like to pride myself in is we try to be at the forefront of how the market is evolving, especially with sales development. So this topic today around how we use AI for account for all the super excited for me and then excited to share with you all. Michael, how about you? My name is Michael Brown. I am the head of global business development, Realtil. I've been a Realtil for about 4 years. Little little over 4 years. Been leading BDR STR teams for about 2 decades now and one of the things I like what you said there one of the things I pride myself on is Being a thought leader or as best I can be an innovator. With what we do here We use traditional rigor with the combination of very modern innovative innovative approaches, and I'm really proud of that. And we're putting up the outstanding numbers, and I love to share my learnings, as often as I can. Love it. Love it. Awesome. So one thing you'll hear from this conversation today is we wanna make this as conversational as possible. We will have a section at the end for q and a, but please by no means necessary, pull yourself back from throwing a question in the chat. We will answer it live. So let's let's do that. So so, Michael, I think the first and foremost before we even get this whole conversation, we'd love to hear why are we even talking about this from your perspective. Now, again, we're talking about with AI and how we're doing account follow-up. And from your perspective, what with what you see in your team, what does this mean and why it's important in the current state? Necessity. Necessity. We, we're facing the need to, you know, looking at our current restrictions in terms of resources. I'm gonna get I haven't always prepared that I'm gonna get a fixed number of resources for the next year, but yet but yet scale but yet grow the volume of our output the quality of our output so necessity and then also. How do I become strategically innovative? And where can I apply that towards what I had to get done as a business leader? So that's what brought us into this AI discussion. I found a a piece that could really work well with our offense. I call our process our offense. So it's a little sports thing so but I found a way that we can integrate this into our process without compromising our offense at all. And, actually, it scales the offense. And, that's what brought me to this point. Yeah. I love that. And I think it's, kinda of going back to what I mentioned earlier on on our side of what I think about this topic and why it's important. I think personally, a lot of what I try to focus on 6th sense is making sure that we're at the forefront and we're evolving our game. But I think it's it's almost kind of one of those things right now where every single one of us in every capacity, regardless of whether it's, you know, account follow-up or marketing or sales, we have to think about how we're leveraging AI to improve our teams. And for me, when I think about using AI for account follow-up is there are a lot of tasks that BDR salespeople are doing that are repetitive, they're monotonous, and we can find ways to make those a lot more efficient and at times a lot more effective. So it's, it's honestly more of a challenge that like we we're kind of doing some great things here. I'm sure Michael you're doing the exact same thing, but it's a lot more focused on trying to be better with what our current state is and make sure we're evolving through time. So it's more of a it's more of a need of just making sure that we're evolving, we're running linear teams, more effective teams with the best technology that we should be to to grow. Chris, can I build on that point just by a quick statement? So with the with the word optimization, one of the things that balance the set so for me as a leader was every peer every quarter, I have on my board, but it makes that what I think is a core of our offense, and then I erase it. Yep and I ask myself the question maybe all that I knew was wrong and I try to rebuild it again and see other areas where we can improve that always look at optimization. I don't know way to make us more efficient that you spoke about earlier to do what happened in and sometimes it's the same, but many times there's a different different wording, a different email structure, different cadence that works. I'll I'll set it for optimization of our VDRT. Yep. I love that. I love that. So before we get into, I think a really important thing to talk about in terms of account fall, but that's exactly what this is. I do see a question in the chat where it says, I'm curious, what are the main challenges you faced with AI implementation? So, Mike, if I can take that, would love to hear your thoughts as well. The biggest thing, the biggest challenge to see with AI is, you're kind of, as I mentioned earlier, we're solving for efficiency and effectiveness. Now at times, there's a challenge of like doing more while retaining the same level of quality that you wanna have, that you would like fewer people or with more resources. And think about email, for example. Right? Using email an effective way to set up more emails to personalize those. Sometimes if you're not good at what you put into those emails or the prompts or how you're crafting your messages, those quality emails may not be quite what you want them to be. So the QA system that has to be set in place to make sure that you're looking at what you're actually sending and making sure it's actually the quality wise is the biggest thing I've seen in terms of implementation. You know, I asked my team the question. I I have to assume that we're the best group of email writers the world has ever seen. Or perhaps there's a way to to optimize and and also personalize what we're doing. So one of the challenges is really just adjusting the mindset of team. Yeah. Is it wasn't a threat to us. It was an area for us to optimize and to get better. So let's collaborate and once we saw the power of that that collaboration, meaning the AI writer, our team, and myself kinda leading this and bringing the team into the process, it it the adoption curve was immediately, on the positive. Yeah. People got behind it. Oh, this is great. And we saw it in reserve to turn the results in terms of open rate and reply rates. Yeah. I agree with that. I think a lot of it just comes down to building a system of trust. Again, I I've written emails for years. I'm sure Mike or done calls for years. I'm sure Mike, you've done the same thing. And sometimes as sales people were so focused on like what I do is the very best and there's no way anyone else can do any better than that. So when you're implementing AI, it's kind of just allowing Google to let go of their Legos as some people call it. And allow the the AI to, operate a lot more efficiently so they can do more what they can be doing in other areas. No. Okay. So switching gears again, I appreciate the question from anonymous in the chat, but we'll talk about account follow-up. What that actually means? So, I know you have a great slide in here. I'm a share really quickly, Michael, but we'd love to hear your perspective on account follow-up and what that means from from your your side of business. So there were several motions. Let me allow me to use the word motions when it comes to account follow-up. They when I prioritize these, I recognize that there was the speed based motion, meaning, a hand raise that came in that you really you got less than 6 minutes to respond, before you may not find that person at their desk or at their computer anymore. So there's a speed bay motion. There is a signal based motion where I've identified via my fire and tick signals that there is a high propensity to buy in this organization. We need to start executing against those. There's also closed loss, so reinvigoration. I recognize that just because you came through our funnel at one point, you consider pipeline, If whatever reason decided not to go forward with the sales process, you're still valid. You're as valid as a hand raiser when it comes to qualifying the need for pipeline. So we assume they're still interested, just not right now. So we have a reinvigoration motion, and and these last 3 are cadence, depth, and hyper personalization. So with cadence, that that is making sure that we're executing not only 9 to 12 plus touches in an account, but also that we have identified personas that are layers deep. And when you do that, that rec we've also recognized more time spent researching, researching the persona, researching the account, crafting the messaging. And so with those 5 priorities, our team is really, really busy. So AI allowed us to when I mentioned scale up, that's AI is our 6th priority where it's always working to the age. Right now, we have it pointed towards the age of engagements. Those leads that were engagements that were about 60 days old. And we're also looking at scaling down when I mentioned the yellow, the reinvigoration. Now that we've gotten better and better at how to leverage the tool, we've been seeing wonderful results. I'm using it for also not only event leads, event follow-up, event reg, driving event registration, but also, the the closed loss engagements, which, again, allows my team to focus on some higher priority, work while, our persona is also going out with the AI writer to generate touchpoint to the the the other audience. So that's how I introduce my skill and my priorities for our team. Yeah. I love that. And I wanna actually touch on some things and ask you some questions as well. So one thing that you and I have talked about in the past is specifically on my speed base. There are a lot of different leads that teams are going after. There are demo requests or content downloads or trade shows. I know you have a very specific perspective on the need for speed for trade show. So one thing that we do here is we actually have a tool called conversational email that if you go to trade show and you get like thousands and thousands of leads, we actually segment those by using AI to determine the likelihood of an account that's ready to have a conversation with us. The ones that are not, we still follow-up with them. But the challenge you see with teams is if you have 5,000 leads from the event and you know, you're only going after the ones that are most relevant, you still have to go the after the other ones just to make sure they bring them to the fold. We use elements of making sure that we're speaking working quickly on those leads with AI, with conversational emails, get quick follow-up that's essentially operating as an AI assistant for our team to make sure we're still having good conversations. But again, like, there are a lot of different pockets with speed to lead, speed to account that just honestly your team's capacity, they will not have the ability to work quickly. So we use conversational email. I know that Michael you've done some things in the past, especially with that like trade show speed lead thing that has to has to be done quickly. Any thoughts on that? Yes. Exactly. I mean, let me build on that. It's not when you get to it capacity. So you you know you only have a a few days after the event to engage regardless of whether you think that lead is allow me to use AB and C right account is a is high B is warm C is cold. While you're doing that, you also wanna make sure you're going after the other leads to the the c engagements because we don't know at that time the why they didn't engage further and have a conversation. Could it perhaps they were busy, pressed for time? We just don't assume anything. So instead of calling leads cold or in some circles, they call them bad or not as good. Listen, everything is good these days. If I we have any engagements that somebody came by the booth, they're all good. We just segment how we're gonna follow-up so my my and recognize that we have to have good conversations at the floor and to translate those conversations into resources that are follow-up with my BDR team. That's speed also at the same time now we're going after the team engagements we got loaded into our CRM to make sure they also get the the the frequency of touch through our AI, engine as well. Instead of waiting 2 more weeks until the beaters get around to it, we're able to do this at the same time. I agree. And, again, that that's when it comes to doing any kind of account follow-up. And the reason why I wanna share this section is to see, like, the the breadth of what you could do. That's the reason why you have to find a different ways to use AI because at the end of the day with a lead that comes from events, if you follow-up 2 weeks after the fact, there's a very good chance they're gonna lose interest or not don't wanna pursue your account. Right? So using AI to quickly scale it out in a in a manner when the team cannot should always be the priority. I wanna share something on here too. You put the the topic of cadence depth. So I have a very, interesting perspective on what we've done here. So a lot of teams in the past, and this this has definitely been something that's changed recently. I've seen that, like, opens and clicks and replies or email have all gone down. We've actually completely shifted the way we've done our cadences where instead of like 20, 21, 22, 23 steps with a mix of automated emails and manual emails, we've actually, we've actually cut it down. So right now we're about 11 steps over 18 days, but there's only manual steps within the cadences. And we're using AI writers to quickly write those emails and make sure that we're using, again, a conversational email tool to do automation in the background. So that's a great example of we know that with the industry email opens response have gone down. We have changed our system to still allow us to do a very high volume of touches and go all the way down the cadences with really good personalized notes, but also relying on AI in the background to make sure we're still sending emails to these accounts with an AI assistant to make sure they're getting good touches on the account. I love that. Love that. Yeah. Alright. Cool. So I guess, Michael, any other questions or anything you wanna share on this piece before we move on to the next part of our resources? You take the word speed. When I mentioned speed based, it's not just meant for the one circle. You you apply that to all all circles. And everything we do is that there's a need for speed. I'm a bar from top gun there. So the eighties top gun, not not 2,000. Anyway, I'm sorry. But there is a need for speed, so we bring speed into the speed of operating our signal based motion, the speed of operating within our cadence step. How do I manage those 6 hours spent researching, give them time back so we can actually get people on the phone the same day? We're also not hiding behind your emails. This this is not an email only proposal. This is an email and outbound calling. Let me repeat that. It's not outbound calling or emails through AI. It's both. It and you have to add the calling element to get people on the phone to understand more about the project to move them forward. It's done in conjunction with the email and our engine as a result. You know, we are more efficient, reaching more people. Our activity numbers are up. And when I say activity numbers up, it's not that we're sending a bunch of emails as bonding. We're responsible with that. It's where that responsibility means there's a reason why that one person received that email at that time by this person. It's it's very intelligent, which we believe leads to us getting the rates that we've received in terms of apply rates and open rates, which have been above standards, today. I love that. I love that. And, actually, I do see one question in the chat, but I I do wanna cover one more thing on single base. And, Michael, if you have any perspective on that as well, I'd love to hear it. So I think a lot of us have seen, because there's so much more information on online, most companies have, you know, 100 if you wanna call it of signals they can go after whether it's, you know, intent data, it's website activity, it's people that change jobs or technographic information. Now a lot of those signals are timely, right? Like if you see that there are certain companies where someone changes jobs, you can't wait 2 months to reach out to them, right? If someone's on your website, doing all this research for your company, if they're doing research on these keywords, you can't wait a month or 2 to go after those. So it is important to know that like first and foremost, using AI to pull in all of those signals from different resources, obviously at 6th Sense we use our platform to do that, but the quick follow-up on that is really important too. So one thing we're also using aside from our email writer tool, as well as conversational email, we actually get the purchase of Orum, which is a power dialer. So we're building lists off of these signals from accounts that are in market to make sure that we're hitting them quickly and trying to have a conversation because the reality is we wanna list we don't wanna miss on the signals. But because we have the AI within Orum, we're able to quickly go after those accounts and try and get conversation that way. I don't know that approach. I I call it moving from knowing. Do we we we wanna know that we know that we know that we know when we reach out. So we're very confident that we're gonna have the right people at the right time with the right message. And I love what you're saying there, Ernst. Yep. Love it. Love it. So I see a good question here and I'll try to answer it first and Michael pass to you. But, the question is what features do you prioritize when choosing AI tools for account follow-up? So again, kind of going back to the ones that we focus on. So we have conversational email here, we have forum. I do see there are some tools out there for social media which I'm a little bit hesitant to use those because I know at times it can kind of mess with your your LinkedIn profile. The biggest thing that I'm focused on is again these two main pillars of efficiency and effectiveness. So how much volume can I get out that still allows me to have very good quality? Right? So if you're using a dialer or a tool, a conversational email, and you're realizing that maybe the quality isn't quite there or there's something that's compromised in terms of pulling the messaging from your team to make it effective, That's something I take a hard look at, but it's not it's not just about the scale of activity. It's making sure that the scale activity is aligned with a really good quality. If you're evaluating tools and you're not seeing that, then I'd look elsewhere to find something else I could. You speak of efficiency and effectiveness. I I I think about it this way. We don't call beyond we don't send beyond our ability to call. So we're not sending 100 if we can only call 50 or 1,000 if we don't wanna call a 100. So we try to make sure that we marry those 2 together. So our AI was very purposeful, where we target it. It's stopping a specific problem. Again, target 3 year earnings. It was efficiency and effectiveness. For us, it was reach scale. And, again, that's not just allow us to send a bunch more emails, but to send very well crafted emails and have even a conversation. We saw we saw this conversation in email. What I love about this, the writers that we ever have 2 step conversation, 3 step conversation with that with that prospect. But before it's passed off to the BDR seller. So it just scales our our ability to reach out to more people, but also in a responsible responsible way. Love that. Love that. So so I'll pass Torch over to you again. It's a question in the chat. It's how do you gather and integrate customer feedback into improving your AI driven follow-up process? So I have my perspective on this, but I'd love to hear from you first. You go first. Yeah, sure. So the biggest thing for us is whenever getting responses, I don't care where it is, whether it's a phone, through email, through social, we're hearing back from our potential customers. And whenever that happens, we can easily go back into conversational email, easily go back to the other sources that we have, adjust the scope of what we're asking the AI to do to make sure our follow-up is more efficient, right? So think about if we're using a tool like conversational email, which allows us to create messages and set them at scale, And we're realizing the market is changing significantly from how we built the models off of. We have to go back periodically to make sure that we're adjusting, to make sure that what we are sending consistently is is actually what our profits wanna hear. So what I do think is important is you're building AI models off of what you believe and see in the market. But if you're not adjusting it based upon the response you're getting from your customers, then you're losing on opportunities. To build on that, it's always a b test. It's measure. It's adjust, execute, and go instead of repeatable loop. We always are making adjustments. We're making adjustments in terms of, well, we didn't yield enough type of numbers we were looking for, But the customer feedback, the prospect feedback trumps everything else. It's really about, did they respond in a way that we hoped? Is there a tweak I can make to the prompts that I put into the system when the when this lead or record is handed off to our VDR? Is it done so in a way that that was seamless? They couldn't identify they were speaking to, an avatar, if you will. So we're looking for modifications to make there, and we're also looking for modifications with with, power of writing emails in any way we can adjust our props to just hone in on how we're doing, what we're doing. And, again, we'd have to be responsible, but at the same time, scale. Yeah. I love that. Love that. Alright. I see another question, Chad. Everyone, please can come. These are great conversations to start. So the question is what medium gives you the best response rates? Cold, cold calls, emails, LinkedIn voice mails, etcetera. So from my perspective, and again, Michael would love to hear your thoughts on this. When I think about account follow-up, every company should know, and we actually track this on the only opportunity level. Where do most of your meetings come from from different channels? Right? From email, from phone, from social, whatever it may be. And every company is gonna be different. For us, we've consistently seen that about 45 40, 45 percent of our meetings come through email. So that's the area that we're always looking to optimize with AI, which is why we double down using conversational email. Our next medium is Zen phone. So, I say the highest response, I mean, for us is just email, but I wouldn't look at us as, like, the gold standard because different industries, different personas respond differently. But if you're thinking about different ways to use AI to do account follow-up, I'd look at where you have the highest responses and then introduce a AI into that process so you can do more with the same level of quality. And I would also just don't minimize the effectiveness of the phone call. So we're saying the same thing in terms of email because it's the connect enhance our connection? Our interest is secured there, but the quality of the conversation is always enhanced with that phone call 10 minutes 15 minutes. If you get longer, that's great, but in that call you got to actually know you got your ears hearing things that we've been trained to understand to get so that when you actually qualify this engagement when you hand this out to the seller, it's really well qualified and whatever standard of process you use for qualification. Adding the call piece to that, in addition to having the email piece to get you to get to the meeting to have the call piece to secure that quality. You're gonna find that I think the results are gonna be much better again we build as as you do or as you build a pipeline with expectation, it's gonna be a pipeline that will progress to close. That's our expectation around everything that we bring in. So, that's why we're careful about what we're bringing in. So these have become projects that will actually progress to close. Yep. I love that. I think one thing to add to on the phone piece. So, you know, think about account follow-up with the phone. So obviously we can't always predict the likelihood of, you know, a 100 calls will equal this many connects and this many meetings, But what you can use AI to do is build those lists effectively and make sure the team has good messaging to do discovery, do introductions that'll be a lot more effective, right? So building lists with as as Michael mentioned, using certain signals, using accounts that are in market with with 6 sense data, etcetera. That's a good way to infuse AI into a process you have of doing phone where, yeah, the team is gonna make a 100 calls in a day, but if they're actually gonna connect with 5 or 6 of those individuals, they will be 5 or 6 from accounts or leads that are much more likely to convert and have a conversation with you. So just one thing to think about how we do an account follow-up with the phone. It's a lot more important to focus on how you're building that list with AI as well as using AI to automate how the team is running their calls, doing discovery, etcetera. Alright. Cool. So we got 4 minutes left. I think we have time for, like, maybe one more question. So the question is no. This is actually due, so you can probably spend an hour on this one. How has the role of BDR SDRAs evolved with the adoption of AI? So I know Michael, you and I, we've we've talked about this a lot. If you want to start, I can start It's up up to you, but we we have a lot on this one if you wanna go first. I I the shortest answer I could come up with would be this. I wasn't certain at first if this was a threat or an opportunity to optimize. Once I adopted AI, I found that it's making us more efficient. And I'm just not saying this because we're having this meeting, but it's I was looking for efficiency and optimization. How do I yield get a team of 9 to operate like a team of 18? How do I get a teammate team to operate like a team of 36? So with that in mind, looking for ways to scale operation, it's it's a much I mean, I was at the early days of beat our SDR, way way back. I won't get my age away, but it has evolved. I've gotten much more strategic. And if you include some of the aspects of account based selling, account based marketing, account based everything into this, It's a really nice blend of the way we sell, not how we sell, but the way that we go about it. And, also, you see, that's where we differentiate. We differentiate by the way that we sell. We differentiate by the way that we sell. I'll turn it over to you, Arsh. Yeah. It's interesting because, again, I I had the unique opportunity of 6 and talking to a lot of customers around how they're prospecting, how they're building their teams. I can tell you this very confidently. There there are teams out there that were 60, 70, 80 teams. Right now, they're a quarter of that producing the exact same results. And for similar to what Michael said, I I don't see it as a threat. I see it as a great opportunity to make sure that we're producing the same level of pipeline with with fewer teams as Michael and I both know, fewer people to manage the easier it is to actually do your job. So I think for the for the scope for the scope of the role, it's becoming a lot more complex. Like, you cannot play the volume game because with the the instruction of AI, there's a lot of good content. There are a lot more calls that are going out, and it's a lot easier for our prospects to decipher what's, you know, what's good versus what what's not. So that the game has up levels to the point where SDRs, ADR, SDRs, BDRs and ADR have to be a lot better at their job and a lot more skilled at what they're sending out and how they're making their calls. So I think it's a good thing is gonna make sure the industry is evolving and making these better sellers at the end of the day. But, it is interesting to see how there are some teams out there that have done a lot more with FarLess, and, you know, that's exactly kinda what we wanna see. Oh, there is. It just I have to build on that list. The profile, with SDR has changed for me over the years. When I'm when I'm hiring and hiring mode, the type of person I'm looking for to run this really a complicated offense in the versus the older days, we're just I need someone to pick up the phone, make a bunch of calls, send a bunch of emails. It's much more artful, much more strategic surgical, if you will, with how we go about our business today and how we use AI as well. Love it. Awesome. So we have 45 seconds left. I guess, last parting words, in terms of using AI for account follow-up, be very intentional with what you're trying to optimize. Again, my mantra is increasing efficiency and effectiveness, whether it's through phone, email, social, certain leads, certain accounts, certain signals, find out specifically what you wanna optimize. And there's there's a plethora of tech out there to help you get there. Start small and go from there. Get it. Yep. I think over time, you find and and in that small population you start with, measure, test, try it again, refine it, and then you can go out to larger audiences. Gonna agree more. Awesome. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.