Why Every Business Needs a Back to Market Strategy – in just 7 Minutes with Jake Dunlap

Related Links and Resources:

He’s going to offer a go-to playbook for any executive or company looking to get active for the first time, so follow the link: https://skaled.com/lp/linkedin-touchpoints

Summary:

Jake Dunlap is the founder and CEO of Skaled Consulting and a recognized Sales Leader and B2B Sales and Marketing Thought Leader. Jake and the Skaled Team help executives around the world accelerate and scale business growth with data-backed sales solutions and a sustainable customer framework.

Along with the list of enterprise clients Skaled has amassed in a few short years (read: The New York Jets, LinkedIn, Insightly, ADP, Microsoft), the majority of Skaled clients are Startups and Mid-Level businesses looking for accelerated growth with a scalable and sustainable path forward.

In these uncertain times, Jake has naturally positioned himself and Skaled as an Expert in adaptability. Jake spends most days leading Executives and Teams through modern demand gen sequences and into the future of sales and marketing. You can consistently rely on him for sharing his true and honest thoughts and advice on any number of his social channels as well as participating in Virtual Speaking Events and Break Out Sessions around the globe.

Before building Skaled, Jake held the roles of VP of Sales at Nowait (acquired by Yelp), Head of Sales + Customer Success at Chartbeat, and VP of Sales at Glassdoor (acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion dollars in 2018)

Here are the highlights of this episode:

2:41 Jake’s ideal Client: Our ideal clients are really CEOs and revenue leaders who are trying to either modernize a component of their sales engine. Whether it’s the demand generation from a marketing stand point, the sales process, the account growth process, or organizations that are looking to scale to new levels. So, organizations that are at 25-50 million and trying to figure out and wondering what are we going to need to do from a revenue engine stand point to get now to 100-150 million, etc. That can be a company going from 1-10, 30 to 100 (million). We really come in and support executive leadership through those changes. Think of this as a consulting firm plus an agency that actually gets into the transition and does a lot of tactical execution as well.

3:35 Problem Jake helps solve: I think now, it evolves, right? As the needs of our market shifts and things changed. But I would say I can boil it down to a couple of criteria. First is modern demand generation; you focus on your SEO strategy, your paid media strategy, your outbound strategy. Well today this is more intertwined that ever. A lot of organizations wondering how are we going to mix our paid, our LinkedIn, organic strategies and create a modern inbound and outbound engine. So that's one. Every company wants more leads. That will be one core problem that we solve. The other is optimizing; really needing the customer where the customers at. Most sales engine is built from a sales organization efficiency first, and customer experience second. And what we're seeing is at B2B, customers are looking for an experience more similar to B2C, where I can learn about the company upfront, I can get to the information that I want, I can get information about the competition, the I can make an educated decision.

4:59 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Jake: There's ones that show on your dashboard or spreadsheet, and there's one that show up in your gut too. Usually what manifest is that they're looking for either ways to increase the volume of their demand generation or outbound efforts. Or, they are looking for ways to better increase their conversion percentages. A lot of sales process boils down into something very simple. The percent of people that convert from each stage to the next, and it’s the amount of time that people spend in each stage. The problem that they have, there is a conversion problem from one step to the next, whether it’s getting that new leads in into that first conversation or down the funnel. Or, things are taking too long. Usually those are the problems that they're experiencing.  Some gap or issue in the process.

6:02 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Jake and his solution: For me, one of the first is we try to almost over index on efficiency. What can we automate? Which isn't inherently a bad thing. But the amount of information that we have and the data that buyers have access to has evolve. And therefore, the sophistication of the sales organization is higher than it’s ever been. So, if you're running this very basic plays that has worked for you 5,10, or 15 years ago were it's like call email, there's so much more going on. So, I can say there's sophistication problem where we still try to build revenue engines that we did from 5-15 years ago. The other is the speed of sales technology, we have 1500 sales specific technology, and that's up to from like 105 years ago. There's this constant battle around the complexity of things and not reverting back to very simple solutions and coupling in how we can use technology to augment a lot of these with tools that just didn't exist.

7:19 Jake’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): Get active on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is now a top 20 sites in the United States. It is where B2B decision makers go every single day or certainly every week. And if you as an executive aren't thinking about your digital presence, because if I google your name, LinkedIn is the number 1 result. And so organization that are able to create ways to engage authentically on LinkedIn, they're sharing thought leadership, they're building a brand. Getting active by producing content that's purely for the audience and focusing on engaging buyers where they are right now, that's the number that I will take.

8:38 Jake’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): There are 5 go-to's for LinkedIn. The good part about LinkedIn is that you don't have to make videos, you don't have to act silly or stupid. LinkedIn over index is text only post. I'm going to offer our go-to playbook for any executive or company that’s looking to get active for the first time, so follow the link: https://skaled.com/lp/linkedin-touchpoints

9:27 What happens next as we go back to market? Is your organization preparing to think about H2 of 2020 or H1 of 2021, are you going to do things differently? My challenge for a lot of executives is almost every company went under the hood with their CFOs; where are our expenses? What are we doing? Are you just going to go back with a fairly similar slightly adjusted go-to market strategy? Are you actually going to look at your outbound process, your sales process and your marketing? Because now I think is the time. We've been making incremental changes but with this I feel that there's a real opportunity for companies to make really monumental leads if they are willing to go under the hood of the revenue organization the same way that they did with their CFO.