Summary:
In this episode, David interviews Steve Mayernick who is in charge of product management at Guru. Guru is a knowledge management solution that can be integrated with Slack to create sales playbooks that are client and situational specific.
Steve gives listeners the rundown of how sales teams can leverage Guru with Slack to make sales easier and faster. They also discuss the many integrations that turn your Slack into a well-oiled machine.
3 Key Points:
1. By using Guru, you can create highly personalized and relevant dynamic sales playbooks in an non-intrusive manner.
2. Using Guru will result in higher collaboration within sales, marketing and product teams.
3. A well-oiled Slack machine with the right integrations can do wonders for your sales development team.
Time Stamped Show Notes:
- 00:00 – Sales Development Conference is coming up on September 21st in downtown San Francisco
- 00:20 – Keynote speakers include Henry Schuck, CEO, Discoverorg; Manny Medina, CEO, Outreach; Kristina McMillan, Director of Research, TOPO and John Barrows, Legendary sales trainer
- 00:46 – Get your early bird ticket from tenbound.com
- 01:09 – David introduces Steve Mayernick
- 01:26 – Slack has become the go-to resource for internal communication
- 01:45 – Tracing Steve’s career path
- 01:47 – Prior to Guru, Steve was running marketing at sales enablement at RJmetrics
- 02:03 – While at RJmetrics, Steve used Guru to develop SDR playbooks and transfer onboarding material to the workflow
- 02:54 – Understanding how Guru works
- 02:54 – Guru is a knowledge management solution that sales teams use to access dynamic playbooks anywhere they work
- 03:27 – Access sales playbook and marketing assets by running a Slackbot query
- 03:41 – Answers provided by subject matter experts are stored as FAQ in Slack and can be accessed easily
- 05:29 – Understanding how a dynamic sales book is made and used
- 05:30 – Situational playbooks are compiled by adding relevant tags
- 06:15 – The plays are compiled specific to a particular sales scenario, by taking into account persona, industry and competitors
- 06:46 – Works in a non-invasive way as a part of the browser extension
- 07:39 – Useful to compile and send relevant information like a deck or an article while prospecting a client; this information is compiled from a prospect’s LinkedIn profile and endorsements
- 08:19 – McKinsey points out that sales reps spend 33% of their time looking for information; Guru aims to cut this down so that reps can spend time more time selling and prospecting
- 09:49 – Guru enables sales personalization and hence, increased relevancy
- 10:00 – In-built workflows make it possible to save client specific messaging that can be accessed by everyone within an organization
- 10:56 – Setting up Guru
- 10:56 – Entire data migration cannot be automated; the manual part involves tagging and creating structures which make navigation possible
- 12:26 – Possible to determine Guru’s influence by analyzing Guru usage and onboarding success of different reps
- 13:05 – Data migration takes 2 to 4 weeks; adoption takes another 2 weeks
- 13:50 – Allows you to see if information is up-to-date, and keeps information up-to-date
- 14:09 – Guru facilitates easier access to data which has led to Optimizely
- 14:45 – Go to tenbound.com/contact to sponsor the Sales Development Podcast
- 15:45 – Guru results in higher collaboration between product, sales and marketing teams and makes your development reps stronger
- 16:49 – Guru manages to capture valuable information that development reps gather from prospects that otherwise would be lost
- 18:00 – “Sales development is like the connective tissue between a lot of different organizations on the revenue side”
- 18:36 – How is Guru being used internally for sales development?
- 18:45 – 3 sales reps, 4 account executives
- 19:00 – Leverage Guru to answer objections, research and prospect clients
- 20:00 – Possible to answer questions in a fast and fluid manner; repeating questions have gone down due to all questions being stored as FAQ in Slack
- 20:56 – Ability to track effectiveness of marketing assets to figure out what is working, and what is not
- 22:32 – A well-oiled Slack machine with the right integrations in place can do wonders for sales development:
- 23:07 – Clearbit allows you to push new user information to Slack
- 22:30 – Setting up a money channel results in Slack pop ups every time you hit a sales goal
- 24:16 – Intercom enables different teams within an organization to actively collaborate while helping out prospects
- 24:45 – Datafox to monitor competitors
- 24:50 – Troops to access Salesforce information
- 24:56 – Product Board to collect information for the product team
- 25:02 – Trello integration for project management needs
- 25:53 – Buyers are influenced by the speed of response—integrating Guru with Slack can improve your speed of response dramatically
- 27:30 – The future roadmap
- 27:40 – Leveraging threads to make Guru less invasive
- 28:00 – Bridging the gap between sales and marketing by using marketing analytics
- 31:20 – Check out the Guru website for resources on Slack integration
Resources Mentioned:
- Sales Development Conference – Upcoming sales conference in San Francisco
- Tenbound.com – Where you can get your early bird ticket for the Sales Development Conference
- RJmetrics – Steve’s previous employer
- Optimizely – An experimentation platform
- Clearbit, Intercom, Datafox, Troops, Productboard, Trello – Slack integrations recommended by Steve
Sponsored By:
Credits
- Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
