Inside a Product Marketer’s toolkit: Using Outreach to win deals

Product Marketing Manager, Kathryn Hofman, discusses strategies to empower sellers in their deals through effective opportunity management. By standardizing processes and providing resources like product tours, sellers gain real-time insights and can collaborate seamlessly with teams. Kathryn emphasizes the importance of controlling the messaging and ensuring that sellers have the necessary tools for success. Additionally, the use of templates and snippets helps maintain consistency while enhancing seller effectiveness. Overall, the focus is on making the sales process more efficient and collaborative.

Supporting Sales at the Crossroads of Product, Marketing, and Revenue

Hi, I'm Kathryn Hoffman and I am a product marketing manager here at Outreach. I am actually gonna walk you through the system today, showing you how I, in my role where I sit at the intersection of sales, product, and marketing. Help our sellers be most effective in their deals, help them be very consistent in their message, and iterate and update as needed. So we're gonna take a look at a couple different things.

We're going to look at some opportunity management, both from the standardization perspective, as well as how I get brought in on bespoke requests, product update requests, things like that. As well as how I update myself on those opportunities if I am being brought in on a deal, and then how I look at our message and content and iterate as we move through the tool.

Driving Opportunity Management and Resource Alignment

So we're starting out here in our opportunity success plan. I worked with our enablement team, rev-ups, marketing, sales, you name it, to sort of build out a very standard process here in Outreach for our sellers to take all of our prospects and customers through.

But a couple things in my specific role that are very value added. When our sellers do a demo for a customer, for example, one of the things that we want them following up with are our product tours. They are our use case tours where anyone can go in the system and sort of check out, get a refresh, etc. Within the template of the success plan, we added all these product tours here as resources.

So say my sales team is giving a demo to a CRO about forecasting. But that CRO really wants one of their trusted sales managers input on coaching and how that's going to improve their process and outreach. Obviously, our team can have that conversation with them, but they can go here and take a look at the Coach and Improve product tour. Now certainly this is on our website and folks can find this, but one of the benefits here is when a seller shares this plan, they're going to be notified when anyone looks at this content.

So from their perspective, they get really granular real time insights on the opportunity. And from my perspective, I make sure they have exactly the resource that I want across the entire organization. So whenever I update this, all of those plans are updated.

Custom Collaboration for Bespoke Requests

Another way that I potentially get pulled in on opportunities is for bespoke requests like ROI tool asset prep or maybe a bespoke business case.

And here we really standardized the process looking at what our top performers were doing. And you'll see that in some of these internal only steps. So we really help ramping reps know exactly the steps to take to be as effective as top performers. Here you see that we have links to some of our internal resources.

You may have a seismic or another internal tool. But one thing that's really beneficial about having all of this information linked out in Outreach is that that's where the seller lives. So maybe they were on a customer call during the last time I updated the team in a power hour on how to use the ROI tool. And they don't need to necessarily know that it's going to be right here.

So we have all of that with all of their subtasks to do. One of those could be to create a task for me as a product marketing manager to join. So maybe this is a larger enterprise deal. It's a bit more custom than our standard ROI tool.

And they want me to be collaborative in that process. I'll take a look in a moment at where that's going to show up on my 360 page. But for now, just know that they can actually tag me in any of these subtasks. The last piece here is going to be like a customer reference.

Now, every customer doesn't need a reference call. Maybe they're our current customer, et cetera. But our customer marketing team also has a process for getting our potential new customers connected with our customers. So sellers can go through this process and tag in the customer marketing team, et cetera.

The other benefit here to all of this is that within the success criteria, on the product marketing team, we care quite a lot how our product is presented to the market. We obviously take care about that on our website and all of our other external resources. But sellers and buyers are going to be living in the app as they're evaluating the tool. So within each of those use cases that we, again, have those product tours that you will see here, I've also added those workflows that we want every single buyer considering as they go through an evaluation.

So again, retain and expand, that's a really, really important part of sales that maybe you're talking to someone who is involved in that side. And again, anyone who joins the plan and looks at any of these resources, that seller is going to be notified. But I, as the product marketing manager, am controlling that message. Beyond that, we have all of these resources like use case briefs and things that maybe some sellers are really in your tool and super aware.

And sometimes things get updated and they miss it because they're focused on a customer. Beyond the external side of the success criteria designed to give our buyers their experience, we wanted to be really intentional with how we help our sellers be most effective. So you can take a look here and see not only some compete statements that I'm guessing are going to be blurred out, but you can also see a lot of our resources that I want the sellers utilizing. There are so many customer stories.

Empowering Sellers with the Right Content at the Right Time

There are so many different things that my team builds that I don't expect the sellers to be able to navigate through all of that because they're really busy and they're running very fast. So I'm making it very easy for them to say, if this is the most important workflow for this customer, then I would like you to use one of these seven resources. Beyond that, sellers use this for note taking as well. So not only can they have external notes that they are collaborating with the customers on, they have their internal notes.

So again, when I get brought in on maybe that bespoke ROI request or bespoke business case, I don't have to go all over. I can get all of the seller notes right here. There's lots that happen in conversation and we're going to look at our conversational intelligence and recording tool here in a moment. But there's also a lot that happens behind closed doors, maybe when it's the seller and their leader and the solutions consultant kind of collaborating together that I maybe wouldn't be privy to.

Outside of spending an hour getting me up to speed on another call, I can just go in here and sort of self serve and be fully up to speed on the opportunity in a very, very short amount of time. This is also really effective for implementation, but we're not talking about that today. OK, so I have now taken a look at the success plan. I want to get into the opportunity.

I have been brought in on that bespoke request. So what do I do? Well, I am going to go to my opportunity overview and take a look at sort of all the engagement that's happened and conversations as well as our latest KAIA recording, which is our knowledge, AI assistant KAIA. This is going to show me all the recordings if I so choose, or I can go to that specific most recent opportunity.

Maybe that was with the CRO and they're really focused on, again, some type of bespoke ROI that's a little bit unique to our tool. So I can go here, I can see the meeting summary, I can ask the tool any questions. So outside of that, you know, internal sync meeting that we may have, I can get most of the information that I need within Outreach itself. This is also really valuable because our sellers can create links to either share internally or externally.

So they do this really often when a top customer says, hey, I would love if, because lots of you guys have wish lists and they'll share that with our product team. And we then can have all of the context for that conversation again, without having to be brought in on an internal sync meeting. Beyond that, the ways that I leverage Outreach are going to be managing both my tasks. So we'll take a look at that really quickly and then we'll look at how I manage some content.

Standardize Messages with Templates and Snippets

So as I mentioned, if a seller wants to bring me in on a specific task, they can just assign me a task in Outreach as a non salesperson where I am then bringing in a reference call or something like that. They can then collaborate with the buyer to get that scheduled in their plan. But for internal opportunity management where every single piece of that is living in Outreach, this is really, really effective. So beyond that, we are going to take a look at how I utilize Outreach content for our messaging.

OK, so now we're going to take a look at our sequences and some of that more content and message focused resources in Outreach. I can quickly see if the message that I have crafted for engaged engaging either new prospects or maybe inviting to one of our conferences or maybe an upsell motion. So we utilize our products and purchases feature to expand our customers. That can trigger a lot of this content.

So say I have a customer that is coming up on their renewal and they are only using a third of our book of products. Outreach can alert my sellers to that. I can establish a trigger so that six months ahead of that renewal Outreach automatically enrolls that seller in the sequence and utilizes our message to reach out to that current customer to have that renewal and upsell conversation and kick that off. I certainly think that what we write is great, but my feelings are not necessarily data backed.

So what's really, really impactful here is I can leverage this score insights on our sequences and see how many sellers have enrolled folks in those. How often those triggers are going off as well as how engaging those are for either our customers or prospects. How many folks are responding, booking meetings at what point they are doing that. And I can really define and iterate our message from there.

Not only that, we also use templates and snippets to really standardize the process of message going out from product updates and new product update feature snippets or templates like winter templates where we have sellers going out on holiday breaks and they need to update their customers on their availability. So those are some of the ways that I leverage Outreach in my role as a product marketing manager to really scale my team, our message, our content and make our sellers both as effective as possible and consistent as possible so that we can really iterate, measure and improve our processes.