Author: Grant Duncan

Categories
jobhunt marketing sales

Cracking the Code: Essential Strategies for Breaking into the Software Sales Industry

I spoke with a former classmate looking for advice about how to break into software sales. My top advice to her?

– Be willing to take a job at a company even if it’s not your dream company.
You can always switch later, and then you’ll have the right job title, so recruiters will be more interested in considering you for positions.

– Narrow down your interest to certain industries / verticals.
It will be easier for people you speak with to think of specific people to connect you with for further networking.
This is the difference between saying, “I want to work in tech” and “I want to work for a health tech software company”.

– Think about marketing yourself.
Make your resume tailored to the positions that you’re shooting for. When describing your results, use the same language as the job descriptions do. You need to position yourself in a way that will be relatable to them.

What’s your advice for her? I’ll send the comments to her later 🙂

Categories
marketing sales salesdevelopment

Transforming Cold Calls: A Personal Experience and Two Key Tips for Successful Sales Pitching

I recently got a cold call from an SDR. What happened?

She asked if this was Grant, and I said it was.

She then immediately launched into a generic pitch about her product for over a minute. No personalization to me or my company, and it sounded like she was reading directly from her script.

I listened without interrupting. I know she has a tough job; I’ve done the job before and didn’t enjoy it.

It was clear me to that the product wouldn’t be a good fit for us now, so I told her I know she has a tough job and asked if she was open to feedback. She said she was, so I gave her two pieces of advice:
1. Make your pitch sound more natural so that it’s not obvious you’re reading from a script.
2. Personalize. Research me and my company before the call at least a bit so that you can tailor the pitch to make it more relevant to me.

What advice would give to this woman?

Categories
Uncategorized

Boosting Brand Visibility: How to Leverage YouTube Developer Influencers with Voximplant’s Video API Integration

I recently kicked off a new initiative / hypothesis: get YouTube influencers that are developers to create sponsored videos on their channels using Voximplant’s APIs/SDKs (e.g. how to integrate video calling into a mobile/web app using our video API).
 
The idea is this will increase our brand awareness and get us in front of new audiences that haven’t heard of us before. It’s also sort of like outsourcing the demo creation part of the devrel function.
 
1. Has anyone done this before? If so, any advice for me?
2. Would anyone like to pitch these YouTube developer influencers jointly? We could ask if they would like to make a video about each of our companies’ products. We could probably get better rates b/c many provide discounts if you commit to multiple videos.

Categories
leadership marketing

Maximize Your Agency Hiring Success: LinkedIn Research Strategies Revealed

There’s something I’ve started doing before hiring a new agency.

What is it? I look at their recent LinkedIn posts as well as the founder’s LinkedIn posts.

I want to see their thought leadership.
I want to see how their thinking is the same or different from others.
I want to see if their clients are commenting on their posts.

Why?

It more tangibly shows the kind of value they may bring to us.

Categories
leadershipadvice marketing

Mastering Employee Onboarding: A Comprehensive Guide to Your First Day Template

I want new employees to feel welcomed and have clear expectations when they join my team. That’s why I created a simple onboarding document template that is shared with them on their first day (see template below).

In addition to meeting important colleagues, this is an easy way for them to start out on the right foot.

Below is part of the onboarding template we use.
Let me know if you like it or would add anything to it (ignore the lack of formatting on LinkedIn).

Hi ,

We’re excited that you’ve joined Voximplant! Below are helpful resources and initial projects. I’ll be meeting weekly with you to support you, check in, and try to clear roadblocks out of your way. Please reach out if you have any questions.

Feedback
It is worth noting that we are very big proponents of feedback. People grow through learning what they are doing well to strengthen those skills and learning what they can improve upon. We are big fans of unsolicited feedback. Make sure to give and receive feedback early, often, and with grace. We want to help make each other better!

Daily Working
– Document collaboration and editing – We like to use Google Drive and related apps for most work.
– Messaging and collaboration – we use Slack to help us increase collaboration and team visibility, interact with each other better, be more productive, and be more aware of what’s going on.

Onboarding
– Identify what you hope to learn from this job in the next six months and what your potential future goals are
– Share any needs or accommodations that I should be aware of
– Follow these Slack channels: – Add your picture in G Suite and Slack
– Review the Marketing Single Source of Truth spreadsheet, especially
— Pitch decks
— Kit Solution Overview
— Platform Technical Buyers Guide
– Familiarize yourself with the products. Examples for how to do this include:
— Watch some of our YouTube videos
— Review the website
— Read our customer stories

How to Use Jira and Submit Tickets

First Projects (in order of priority)

We’re excited to have you on the team! Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Categories
leadgeneration marketing prospecting

Boosting Marketing Strategies: Effective Collaboration with SDRs and BDRs

As a marketer, working closely with your SDRs and BDRs is super important. They’re on the frontlines and hearing feedback from prospects daily.

What are some of the ways you keep a close connection? As an example, we have a Slack channel with all of them to ask questions and brainstorm new ideas with Marketing.

Categories
Uncategorized

Why Settling for Less in Your Career is Not an Option: Choosing the Right Company

Life is too short to work for a company you’re not excited about (assuming you have the ability to choose which company to work for)

Categories
marketing podcast

Riding the Podcast Wave: How Businesses Will Use Podcasts to Engage Customers in 2022

In 2022, I predict podcasts will become a primary channel for how customers learn from their vendors.

Podcast listens are growing rapidly, and not just for personal / fun podcasts. There are a lot of business / professional growth podcasts!

And this isn’t just a national trend. This is happening globally – just ask any podcast host to show you their regional breakdown of listeners.

Many companies are launching their own podcasts as a way to create thought leadership. They often bring on outside experts.

This is a great way to engage with existing customers and keep them viewing you as a valuable resource, and it’s a good way to engage with new people who aren’t yet customers.

So how about you?

Categories
jobsearchhelp linkedinadvice

Revamp Your LinkedIn Profile for a Successful Job Switch: Top Suggestions for Customer Success Professionals

I gave feedback on a friend’s LI profile as she’s trying to switch jobs. See below for what I said.

Want some feedback on your profile? Comment below and I’ll give you a couple of pointers.

Consider changing your last job to have just one title / experience rather than two that happen at the same time, and title it something like Client Management and Customer Success.

Consider changing your top title under your name to something like Customer Success so that it’s clearer to people your focus.

Limit your Open to Work “My next job should offer me:” section to just one: “Customer Success Manager”.

Update your about section to be more about customer success too.

Consider changing other job titles or job descriptions to relate better to common job req bullet points.

Add English as a language.

Add volunteer experience.

Get a few recommendations from past colleagues listed on your profile. You could even help suggest topics for what they can write about if they’re stuck.

Your college is listed twice in the education section. Remove one of them. Make sure the one that stays links to the actual LinkedIn page so that people can see it’s a real college.

Categories
copywriting education english teaching writing

Boost Your Writing Skills with Grammarly: The Ultimate Chrome Extension for Error-Free Content

Thought I’d share a helpful tool for improving writing skills. Grammarly is a Chrome extension that is a freemium writing assistant. I use it every day, and it helps me correct spelling and grammar issues. Let me know in the comments if you already use it or if you try it out and find it helpful!