Beyond Personalization: How Humanization Drives Real Connections

welcome everyone to the GTM summit we're here in Austin and you see that we're in this beautiful Creator setup and it's provided by influ 2 and I'm really excited to dive into why exactly influ 2 is doing what they're doing I'm excited about it because a lot of things that we're working on here at a but first and foremost John introduce yourself you were telling me about your hockey days could you actually just tell us your favorite hockey story let's start there uh my name is Joe mcneel sier o influ 2 uh my favorite hockey story I don't know I I actually my favorite hockey stories around my kids now my son's into hockey and and so he uh he always comes and he's like Dad how did I do today like do you have fun it's like yeah it's like you did good then that's it all happen cool awesome so let's dive into the first component year which is outbound is evolving what exactly does that mean to you Joe and exactly like what should we be pag to do yeah so I think you know way back in my day

when uh I was really driving a ton of outbound strategy like outbound was about you differentiated Yourself by personalizing your content right like personalize emails co- calls tying the voicemails you know for better or worse now with AI like personalization is is available at scale you can automate personalization yeah so like what what I see is like the the new differentiator now is is humanization right like how do you show that you are a human and you can provide the the person you're reaching out to value in a conversation instead of I think sometimes we try to take take take with our prospecting it's like what how do you how do you reach out and engage in a way where it's like hey I want to talk to this person because I can learn something from them not just learn about their product now that that sounds like something that everyone should be doing but they're not so what do you think is the reason that most people don't take that human-based approach it's hard it's really hard like like I think you know the market is tough right now and and there's two ways you can look at it you can look at it like oh you used to be able to to really like automate a lot and get a lot and now you need to know a lot to be

able to provide value but for me like there's an opportunity there for executors right like for the people that can really drive that execution and drive that strategy like there's a window there not very many people are doing it and it's just tough to scale because you need to really focus on training and enabling your people in a meaningful way yeah but you also really need to hone in and be focused on who are my buyers instead of sort of carpet bombing the industry and waiting for people to raise their hands yeah you don't want to do that yeah that's not the move that's not the move so I I want want to unpack something because you said I feel like a lot of people they try to figure out how can I personalize that scale and the word there comes in there which is scale do you feel like thinking about the word scale actually ruins the human touch and it actually deters buyers away from looking to meet with you yeah yeah I think I think right now you see a lot of folks trying to almost build an inbound engine via outbound like with AI agents and and automating all these things and and I think like there two ways you can use AI you can use it to try to automate or you

can use it to empower the people yeah and really like it it was hard before to engage with buyers and provide value because you had to do a lot of research right well like AI is a huge opportunity for providing a lot of research in a short amount of time so you can learn a lot about your buyers so I think if you leverage it more on the side of like let's use AI to identify like our our very sweet spot audience and let's do a lot of research into how we can provide value for that audience and and in doing a lot of research and looking at what youall are doing um it sounds like the main thing you're focus on is allbound now I think we have a lot of inbound outbound I don't know sometimes there's like what has even happened with bound right so could you explain a little bit more what is allbound and how does that play into bringing values to the right people and having the right message yes so the idea of all bound's been around for a while it's it's nothing like revolutionary new but I think if you zoom if you think about an outbound sequence right you have your emails your LinkedIn your voice memos and really the power of a sequence is the sum of all of its parts it's not any

one individual piece and it's like the more elements that you bring to that sequence the more powerful it becomes well I think allbound is the same idea it's just looking at it at the commercial level it's like it's your it's your marketing team it's your partner team it's your outbound team and it's like how can we bring Synergy amongst all of those teams yeah to really drive forward uh our pipeline strategy and I think you know a lot of times companies they measure what they can not what they should yeah and so big dashboards well and that's really what's d d you know driven these inbound strategies and these partner strategies they've become so singular focused and it just doesn't work I think you know everybody talks about what's dead now I think just single Channel pipeline strategy is dead yeah I think you need to have Synergy amongst your team careful when you say something's dead people come after you so you gota be careful we gotta be careful with that one so but to a degree I do believe you I think it's everything needs to be multi-purpose you can't just rely on one thing maybe back in the day you could but you can't and and when you think about all these different functions it's really about how do you make sure that revenue is a team sport is essentially

what you're saying there so from your perspective as being the cro you obviously have multiple functions that you deal with how are you making sure that there's alignment across those teams and and which teams should you start with first to be like okay we need the foundation here and then we go here or is it different for each orc I think it's a little different for each or but a lot of times it's the fundamental stuff but like how does marketing Define what it means to win how does sales Define what it means to win how to like your commercial teams Define what it means to win that's like the the building block of everything you just can't get into a situation where at qbrs you know one of the teams is doing great the other one is not like you win together you lose together and then on top of that like who's the target audience what is the messaging you you'd be surprised at how many organizations marketing is focused on a different audience than sales yeah and the messaging isn't align completely off because they have their inbound focus and they're optimizing One Direction sales has their outbound focus and they're optimizing a completely different direction and that's how you get this weird lack of alignment yeah I I 100% agree with that and then there

creates right metrics that they're tied to that are completely different it creates all these different disputes and then you know now you're in a terrible place right and that's not what you want so I want to get like very tactical here though um because you've talked about all these different allbound functions is there an allbound function that people you feel like are not leveraging as much that they should focus more on yeah I think it's really focusing on the buyers and being very specific and intentional about Outreach cuz you know people buy not companies yeah and so like you see these concepts of account based marketing strategies and really like a lot of companies what account-based marketing is is they just take their old marketing strategy and they squeeze it into an ABM motion focus on these accountsm it's like hey it's GNA work it's like I don't know about that yeah but it's really like and part of it is it's it can be scary because right now pipeline's tough to generate yeah and it's and going to your board and saying like hey the new strategy is we're going to be more focused yeah which means we're going to do less output yeah but like that's really what it takes cuz you have to map who are our

Target buyers like what matters to these individuals not not accounts individuals and then how do we engage with those individuals in a meaningful way yeah and and walk me through that as a senior leader you're going to the board you're talking to your team I feel like the main thing is hey we just need to get more pipeline we need 6X coverage just so that we can close those deals but we all know all pipeline isn't good pipeline because and you look at it being like what is even in here right so how are you making sure you're having that conversation with the board you said f the right buyers what's that process like is it going through the CRM is it having round taes like what are you doing there it's it's having a very deliberate ICP yeah right like like these are the accounts that we're going to get pipeline from and then having a very intentional uh buyer Persona map yeah it's like these individuals Within These accounts are the folks that are going to make it into the pipeline and then here's how we're going to attack it so I think from that standpoint it's just being very prescriptive about like what does it mean to generate pipeline it's not hey you know we sell to to B2B companies let's get B2B companies in the

pipeline that's probably not it right so so if if we're aligned in our messaging if we have our buyers mapped and if we have our ICP very tightly you know defined then anything that comes from that is going to be quality as long as it's you know right expectations and that's where the messaging comes in and and speaking of expectations as we wrap up here um you're obviously by yourself and you're getting hit up on LinkedIn email calls WhatsApp I don't probably I don't know what this a lot at this point so what have you seen that stands out to you and what would be your number one thing that you would tell go to market teams to stop doing that you're seeing a lot of yeah so so I used to reach out or respond to like all sdrs okay you know I had I had a ton of SDR Legend I'd love well they should put you in the Hall of Fame used used to is the key right and I had a ton of sdrs I love sdrs and it's like I felt like it was my way of giving back but now there's so much and and most of it's not coming from are yeah it's just it's just it's just automation right so so people think of like hey you know what email template should I make

to to convert it's like well I don't read 90% of them because like you can you can just tell right away it like like never heard of this person never seen this person totally generic messaging so for me it's like be human if if someone's hitting me up on LinkedIn you know with voice memos leaving me voicemails and then I see them popping up into my email inbox and they're referencing that they're reaching out and like the messaging can tell that they've they've put time and they've talked to folks like me in my market like I'll give them the time of day yeah you know those the F and honestly you know you probably get a million emails a day I get like four of those a month right now yeah it's very rare like like you don't you just don't see it very often anymore so so like it sounds simple but it's it's there's not a lot of it out there right now that actually interesting because I've talked to a lot of Executives and they're saying they're not getting as many emails they're getting more LinkedIn messages that are automated and they get next to no calls yeah that's it super I think a lot of people are afraid of talking to another human yeah in general

so they're like yeah I don't even want to do that well I just think in today's world where pipeline's tough to come by like a lot of company answers is more bling yeah it's like hey we're g to we just got to reach out to more folks yeah and then you know so so the strategy becomes a mile wide and inch deep you know and like unfortunately you have to you have to get away from that at some point yep you do otherwise like you're going to be in a bad spot and then the market will respond and be like well we've heard of you and now we don't want to work with you because the messaging was off or whatever it may be yeah right 100% so if you all want to learn more about what influ 2 is doing go check out influ 2.com but the thing is you also we talked about allbound but you'll have a new term that you're also coining and trying to create as well so tell us a little bit more about that yeah yeah so we do name buyer ads and really like how we support our customers and what I'm talking about is this area focus is we target named individuals so we sync with our customers CRM we build out campaigns and then you target the individuals with unique messaging stage relevant messaging depending on where they are at in their their Journey

with you and then we push that engagement back to the contact record in Salesforce or HubSpot and it it just allows sales to see how warm a contact is see what they're engaging with so they can they can you know reach out to them at a human level and then it helps marketing they can look at what are the conversion rates of the folks that that you know we're creating engagement with with these ads versus those that we targeting so it's really you know supporting that that idea of focus it sounds like magic I don't know is Magic sounds like it sounds like magic Jo I don't know but here's the thing is that one of the critical things that he just said that I hope everyone understands is that it's about not only marketing providing the right air cover for a sales to convert it's also from the sales perspective to Target the right people in the right conversations to lead a more quality pipeline customer success is Happy everyone's happy across the team and that's what you're talking about right it's allbound is not just hey we're just GNA Reach Out thousand people it's marketing's doing their job with the right name ads that you have sales is coming in making sure they convert the right opportunities and the whole team is good so as we wrap up here any lasting things that you want to say

before we wrap up I would just say like like buying Behavior has changed B2B buyers have changed there's more there's so many people involved in it and and you know the best way to to engage with them is to provide value yeah awes that's it provide value