Effective Outsourcing of Marketing and Sales

Jessica Ly: I'm here with Michael Coates, who is the VP of technical sales strategies and also the CTO at N3. Now part of Accenture, Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Coates: Thanks for having me.

Jessica Ly: You've been there for nine years, and you've seen the growth of this company. Not many people might know about it. So please let us know. What does N3 do and I know it's a outsource sales and marketing firm, but dive in a little bit more about the expertise you have.

Michael Coates: Sure thing. We are outsourced sales and marketing. We manage technology clients’ sales pipeline, everything from simple BANT budget authority need a timeline, selling all the way through full-cycle sales and account maintenance. I've been with the company for nine years, as you say we were 200 people. When I joined, I think I was employee 200. And now we're approaching 3000. We were purchased by Accenture this past October.

Jessica Ly: Okay, I know that with this COVID situation, there's a lot more transformation to the digital side of the business. And you've seen a lot of demand for your expertise. Tell us a little bit more about, say, for example, how large companies leverages your expertise to win on the marketing front and on the sales front. Because I know a lot of companies have internal teams, but sometimes they outsource it. And so sometimes, you know, it's like an extension of their company versus an outright outsource team handling the entire department.

Michael Coates: Yeah, it's about half and half. About a third reality, there's a third of low-level market demand motions. We will augment what their marketing is doing, they may have a webinar series set up and we'll call down follow-up on that targeted content with the titles and roles provided. So we can really customize that outbound message. In other cases, we'll work with companies on the sales and executive side, say a company has five sellers and they want to get to 50, we can get them there in a matter of months versus a longer time. And plus, with our global footprint, 15 locations, around 70 countries served in about 25 languages, we can get these folks, these companies, into markets much more expeditiously than they can do on their own across those markets.

Jessica Ly: I think now that you're part of a center, you're going to have exposure to a lot of large clients. So I think it's wonderful for you that you're part of Accenture. One of the questions I was thinking about is like, well, a lot of leaders might feel threatened when you approach them and say, Hey, we can do great services. We're an outsourcing firm, and people feel threatened by that sometimes. How do you handle those kinds of concerns?

Michael Coates: Well, we can be part of their existing sales team. What we will do is clearly defined lead acceptance criteria. To what point should we take the sale will refer to 100% sales cycle where 20% is Bampton. 40% has a level of commitment, potentially a discovery, as you get into 60%, or agents can go as far as doping, licensing, doing early contracting. So I'm not answering the question as to the threat. I'm just saying we will fit with the there are sales teams that we have. We have expanded and allowed those sellers, captive sellers of the client, to move higher in their organization. We’ve done well for them, so they do well with their company.

Jessica Ly: Let's talk about your expertise. I know you handle a lot of the content creation for the sellers to leverage. Give us examples when you try to target new prospects, say in the cloud or in SD-WAN, you know, the networking side of the industry and you're going after certain clients may be SAS players. What would you look for in the content that is effective? How do you actually end up getting the right kind of content to make sure that it does have that conversion?

Michael Coates: Yeah, and as I shared in the preamble, we've grown about 25% here during COVID. A lot of that has been finding the kinds of businesses that can benefit from the work in a home environment. Many of these include business support services, payroll systems, cloud-based DRP systems that, abroad, SMB mid-market base can again engage with to bring their systems up to date. We've also done a lot of work in UCaaS and CCaaS unified communications as Service Cloud contact centers as a service. A lot of folks have on-premises PBX is now they have worked from home users, which led us also to working with cloud VPN alternatives. A lot of companies had on-premises assets and needed a better way than a VPN to get those on-premises assets as well as being able to manage control over their work from home employees, much like they would if they were in their offices with an on-premises firewall.

Jessica Ly: When you have the content that you're creating, for the direct sales reps, and three to go after the prospects, that is the content creator leveraging like industry reports to talk about the big business trends and the business impact more than the macro view and is that kind of content put into bite-size, and I enablement format that can be suggested to the seller and tracking the impact of the content, so you know the impact of what you're creating, and where to invest for the development of that content.

Michael Coates: So think in terms of two sales tracks, one of the sales tracks I support is our end three sellers that do outreach for our clients. So I try to steer them towards the kinds of companies three examples I gave just a moment ago, help them understand the domain. What does UCaaS and see CCaaS do what to cloud firewalls do so they have an understanding when they make their initial contact, they have some credibility, just moving into that. The second is when we build out our kits for our sellers. Not only do we provide that domain expertise, so they understand the space. But we also craft initial openers. I want to make sure that they can make an incredible impression. With a prospect in the first 12 seconds of a dial, we spend a lot of time on objection handling and quite a bit of time on competitive Intel, not deep Intel to unpack the environment, but be able to respond how to manage to respond to that, when in doubt. Our elite acceptance criteria typically enable us to provide a more advanced seller into that environment, someone who can probe more deeply, do scoping discovery, all the way into contracting proof of concept before we hand it off to a client seller.

Jessica Ly: And is there a tool that you actually use this to? Or is it very much one-on-one teaching coaching? Sellers?

Michael Coates: Well, our LMS is where we put that camp campaign focus tenant focus our LMS has all that content, I will workshop with the teams in order when they craft the messaging with my guidance, they learn more about it becomes more natural and more comfortable for them. When we provided in our contact center as a system service, there's a series of kits of the openers. These openers are baits. We gave an example earlier. You would speak about an offering differently to a line developer and architect than you would to a CRO, so we give our agents the kind of tools that they can use and they workshop them. So they grow them as they go and grow themselves as they go in order to know the kinds of questions that will impact these prospects as quickly as possible, giving them the credibility that they need to stay on the call.

Jessica Ly: Yeah, and I think about the scaling of sales effectiveness out when you have your agents who are representing the clients, the large clients and you're working on their behalf to try and kind of get the leads or get the revenue for them. There's got to be the leveraging of technology with automated content that is suggesting to them, almost like in the call center where the agents have a knowledge base and the AI to suggest answers. Is that what it's happening when you look at the large-scale programs you're doing.

Michael Coates: That’s where this content winds up. Again, the most important thing is the message. The most important thing is making sure that you're talking to a crotchety technology owner like myself, and I don't put you on hold because you're not. You do not sound credible to me. Once these messages are tested and vetted, once they're on the market and we do daily stand-ups in the early stages of a campaign, they go into our contact center as a service, they are available to our agents in real-time. We've got some good listening capabilities. We will see that with various competitors and various statements in order to ensure that the agent has something in front of them. The kind of keywords it's everything is new and everything is changing. There's a lot of processing that goes into getting those proper answers. The early stages are slower than the later stages because we have a lot more experience with them.

Jessica Ly: What are some of the trends that you see the challenges you're seeing as we are leveraging a lot more technology and doing a lot more digital marketing and selling?

Michael Coates: Yes, phone numbers are always a challenge. Given the work from home environment, we spend a great deal of time in online sources like LinkedIn. We get lists from a variety of online sellers. A lot of email addresses have gone personal. So old metrics that we had as to contact success have changed wildly once everybody left the office. Now that's settling down again, I mean, corporate directories are now working again, even though they themselves may be on unified communications as a service, your front desk receptionist person, you know, is now in the front desk at their home, and they're still routing calls over a cloud switchboard. And those kinds of gatekeepers are also in brand new agents on how to get through to the gatekeeper, as well, on the phone, as well as using other digital kinds of assets.

Jessica Ly: What's been most effective for you in the method of approaching prospects? What's been the greatest conversion for you and response rates for you.

Michael Coates: You know, having a solid asset is always good. A warm, timely warm call down is always very effective, as is having a trial. Hand razors are great fund, you know, just because they have a project in mind, they consume the asset for a reason, or they took down the trial for a reason. So we'll always have a lot of success connecting with those. It's a lot of legwork that clients, sellers don't necessarily want to do. So when we run across somebody who has a trial and they've requested the trial, a lot of trial abandonment happens. We can fill that gap. Meaning they get into it, they downloaded it. They’re not interested in talking about the first call. They never find time to complete all the tasks until the trial is over. And that happens so much in many of these companies. We provide that stop-gap will create the cadence that says okay, by the end of week one you should do this week two, you should be doing that week three, we create that intimate relationship and provide enablement to ensure that we can create some stickiness with the trial.

Jessica Ly: Well, my call, you know this, stay at home, work from home. Even though we're over a year now from when we stay at home, I think it's going to remain for the rest of the year. Your thoughts on corporate America and business remote work?

Michael Coates: Yeah, I'm not convinced I'd want to own a lot of commercial real estate. Right now, I see a number of offices from the various clients and, and customers that were reaching, refactoring those offices. And we, for example, have four floors in Atlanta, a fairly expensive real estate, around 500 employees here in offices and our other 15 locations. I can see companies looking at the four floors that they have and deciding they really only need two of them. One for the executive suite reception areas and some conference rooms the rest for jet cubes when folks come into town, the fact that we've accelerated so rapidly this last January last 12 months has accelerated so rapidly and in helping companies to manage their workforce in such a way that doesn't involve real estate. I think it's a bit of a challenge. We've done campaigns for IoT companies who helped manage the return to the workplace scenario. Retail areas making sure that there are not too much density offices that have shared kitchens and shared spaces that can track traffic, make sure that if someone goes against a one way that they're notified, large screens in the environment to give up to the minute information on what's going on and directions people should take just, so everybody feels comfortable. I've done a fair bit of work on that in the design of those systems and working with the partners for our clients, as to how do we ensure that everyone can feel safe in the workplace, but in commercial real estate, I'm just not convinced that a lot of employees are going to maintain permanent space it's going to be an interesting year to to to sort that.

Jessica Ly: I assume that you're going to grow beyond the 3000 employees now. Being part of Accenture, is everybody working from home to that?

Michael Coates: We are we went we in three March 13 went remote over a weekend tested over a weekend we spent about a week sending out my son and monitors, but another week helping to fix various home-based internet connections and helping a stipend for some of the folks who didn't have fast internet at home. Yeah, so I don't expect us to have a whole lot of returns to offices. I do. In that time, our CCaaS systems have matured to the point where we've got great connectivity with the agents. We know how they're working day to day there. They're comfortable with the new automated environments, you know, the idea of a cubicle and somebody walking the floor. It just doesn't exist anymore. All these things are data, and the tracking is just so solid. We know that our employees are staying productive.

Jessica Ly: Well, it's been a great conversation. Michael, I appreciate you being on the show to talk about and three. Congratulations on being part of Accenture and it's an exciting business for you. The growth is still going strong. So great to have you on the show.

Michael Coates: Well, thank you so much for having me.