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OppSource |
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October 16, 2017 Issue |
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CEOCFO MAGAZINE |
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Q&A with Mark Galloway, Co-Founder and CEO of OppSource providing a Sales and Engagement Software that enables B2B Sales Organizations to Engage with today’s Modern B2B Buyer |
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Co Founder & Chief Executive Officer
OppSource
Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – October 16, 2017
CEOCFO: Mr. Galloway, what is the idea behind OppSource? Mr. Galloway: In this day and age we have all been “Amazoned”, meaning nobody buys anything like they used to buy it, starting with us consumers and then taking our consumer behaviors into the workplace. That has resulted in B2B sales organizations finding it more difficult to get engaged with today’s modern B2B buyer. The whole paradigm of B2B selling has changed, it is a buyer’s journey and not a seller’s journey. There is a lot of need in the marketplace for solutions that help sales organizations cope with and actually transform the way the engage with today’s modern buyer. That was the impetus for us to build the company and actually build the sales and engagement software to enable that.
CEOCFO: What do you understand on a fundamental level about B2B selling? Mr. Galloway: The biggest insight we have is something we call, “Moment of interest engagement”. The idea being that each of us in this day and age are time constrained. When we do have an issue and we think of an idea and we start to be stimulated and provoked into going and finding solutions, those are our collective moments of interest. Those are the perfect times for sales people to engage with today’s buyer. The challenge is intersecting buyers in their moments of interest. What we have identified as kind of the intersection of today’s selling path is you have to understand digital interactions when the buyers throw off these types of interest signals. Consequently, we built a software platform that captures those moments, from all the potential sources a customer would engage digitally like the company’s website, marketing email campaigns, and from social media digital signals. These digital signals and their indicative nature of being moments of interest are probably the most important points of intersection. The second aspect of today’s B2B selling that is really important is when you intercept somebody who has interest, the last thing you want to do is talk all about you, it has to be about them and you have to be relevant in order for them to willingly invest precious moments of their time in learning how you might be able to help them. It is moment of interest engagement with relevance. The third aspect of selling today is you are not always going to get connected with people even if you time your follow up to intersect with their moment of interest. So you also have to have some kind of persistence factor. A process that actually helps you keep track of how many attempts you have put forth in trying to engage with that person. Again, there needed to be solutions and our software is the only one that brings all three of these modern sales engagement tactics together in an integrated sales engagement platform, purpose-built for today’s modern sales professional.
CEOCFO: How do you know when someone might be ready for this? Mr. Galloway: Most of today’s buyers start with some kind of search. They go to Amazon or Google to look for a solution. In most cases a customer’s initial touchpoint path starts with some kind of internet search. Ultimately somebody clicks on something that catches their attention and in many cases it is an organic link with a search engine like Google. In other cases it may be a paid ad within the search results that catches their attention. Those are the moments that signal people are interested. It is in those moments that you really need to be responsive. In most cases, probably one of the biggest mistakes that companies are making with the investment they are making in digital marketing is they are not doing follow-up in a responsive enough way. In many cases those responses are hours later, days later and in many cases weeks later and by that time, today’s modern buyer has already moved on. So if your follow up with prospective customers in longer than twenty minutes, your chances of engagement are going to be dramatically limited. When you send emails to people today you really have to utilize techniques and technology that allows you to see when people open your email. You also need to have embedded content so that if you have been relevant in your messaging, they will click to go deeper with their interest. These are the digital signals that alert modern sellers they need to follow up immediately.
CEOCFO: Are you surprised companies have to be told they should have someone responding quickly? Mr. Galloway: Much of it is that for many people who are new to this their first reaction is to think it is kind of creepy or that it is kind of like stalking people. On the other hand, if you follow up with someone in their moment of interest, then your initial engagement with them is relevant and it brings additional value to their search and their discovery, they will appreciate your help. You will also be the first person to create predisposition in their brain. With that critically timed engagement, you have a chance to plant seeds that will pay off later when your competitors who are late to the party will not get the benefit of that important first impression. The second aspect is just organizational. Many companies still use an all-in-one sales model, meaning a hired sales person is expected to prospect, to follow up on leads, to build on relationships that they have already established and follow up with customers that they have already sold. Their time in one day does not allow for setting aside the critical follow-up time for a new lead that comes in. This time constraint is the reason that many organizations are starting to figure out they need to reengineer their sales into more of a revenue supply chain and to have specialists that are focused on all these different aspects of the lead to cash process.
CEOCFO: Are there some products that no longer make sense to be sold B2B or can almost anything be tailored to what OppSource offers? Mr. Galloway: Our ideal customer is somebody that has more of a configurable offering that typically does not have a “Buy Now” button on their website. Selling their products typically requires some subject matter expert to help them tailor a solution. On the other hand, where it is pure commodity and the prospect is already buying a similar product or service, they already know how to use it, and they just need to replenish, those situations do not require sales people in this day and age. In those commodity product or service scenarios, if you are not already using e-commerce to sell that type of product, you are probably struggling to stay in business.
CEOCFO: In general, who is reaching out to you? Mr. Galloway: Typically, the person we engage with is the chief sales officer of a B2B company that is trying to figure out how to grow more profitably. Part of what our ideal customer has come to realize is that having a sales pipeline that is big enough for the growth they want is probably where the fundamental root cause of their growth challenge is. Most of our customers today are right in the middle of some kind of transformation of their sales organization where they are reengineering their sales organization by adding a lot more inside sales people or business development types early in the lead development process. It is a cheaper and more cost effective process model and they do not have to pay for travel, entertainment and other expenses. However, traditional software that they have used for CRM was really not built for this new type of dedicated prospecting and sales engagement. Our solution is geared to helping optimize prospect and sales engagement at the top of the funnel. In many cases most of our customers are seeing a three to four times improvement in productivity using our product versus trying to use their traditional CRM tool for enabling the types of modern sales engagement we’ve discussed this morning. That is a substantial ROI, by enabling one of these new inside sales types to do the work of three to four.
CEOCFO: How do you help a company through the trepidation of making a change? Mr. Galloway: We try to help on the front end of the process by giving them discovery tools, surveys and a checklist where they can self-identify whether or not they have a process and workflow bottleneck, they just may not know it or recognize it. We give them diagnostic and discovery tools on the front end of our selling process to help a new prospective customer figure that out and come to terms with it themselves. Once they see where the bottlenecks and constraints are in their process, then they are much more open to figuring out what their options are for removing that constraint or bottleneck. The second way we help reduce risk and embrace change, is to start the process with a pilot program. A six month pilot program where we can actually help them prove out the improved productivity with a limited number of users and prove out success very quickly. Once they feel confident, then it is a matter of helping them scale it up across their user community who need our product.
CEOCFO: How is business? Mr. Galloway: It is goal very well. We raised a Round of Seed Stage capital in May. We have seen a jump since we added sales people to the team. We have gotten our name out to the types of companies that are already looking for the types of solutions that we offer. It is going very well and we believe it happens to be perfectly timed for the big transformation that is taking place in B2B Sales. There is not a B2B company right now that is not in some form of transformative status. Everybody is trying to figure out how to grow more profitably. I think everybody has figured out that this idea of expecting a single quota sales person to be able to do everything, has reached the end of its life. Many sales organizations around the world are reengineering their processes and the organization structure to execute on that.
CEOCFO: Is there a global reach in your future? Mr. Galloway: Absolutely! This is not a problem that is contained to North America. It is a global problem that represents a global opportunity for us.
CEOCFO: What is the strategy for OppSource the next year? Mr. Galloway: We have a targeted set of objectives, a critical mass if you will, of end users, which proves that our solution can scale. We also are keen to help our customers that are already invested with us prove that they can have a huge payoff for using our technology to enable their modern sales approaches. For us it is about customer success and getting that critical mass of early adoption customers onboard. |
“The whole paradigm of B2B selling has changed, it is a buyer’s journey and not a seller’s journey. There is a lot of need in the marketplace for solutions that help sales organizations cope with and actually transform the way the engage with today’s modern buyer. That was the impetus for us to build the company and actually build the sales and engagement software to enable that.”- Mark Galloway
OppSource
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Mark
Galloway