Success after the last mile — Aaron Bollinger // Kronologic

Quotes

• “Basically, the feedback we are getting is that success on our platform completes the loop. What used to be a gap in their metrics is now quantified and they have quantified it in a few different ways.” -Frank“Some of our customers are talking to us about calendar utilization across a team. In other words, I used to be at 40% or 50% of my reps on average calendar time would be in meetings and you got me into 60 or 70%, that’s meaningful. I know that equals dollars dropping to the bottom line.” -Frank “So there’s calendar utilization which we are hearing back from sales managers and then there is the idea that the accepted meeting is the highest and most qualified lead. So the minute we see those accepts come back, we can give a higher score to those leads than before that we were chasing them around.” -Frank“Many of them are good problems. If your volume outweighs your team, it’s an indication that you might need to open up a position or try to grow. We have a few of those clogged up calendars indicating, we need more SDRs on the ground but it’s usually a pretty good sign.” -Frank “This is getting down into the nitty-gritty of two ways to use Kronologic. One way is to connect it to a lead source like your contact form. Maybe you are getting 5 or 10 opportunities a day, you will get some idea from your web traffic of how much is going to come through.” -Frank “Another is to export a giant list and sort of drop a huge campaign all at once. In that case, we found that sometimes you need to stagger that thing out. It only makes sense. If I drop 2,000 names into the system, I can overload the calendar’s ability to pick it up.” -Frank“My first answer is closing the loop analytically. Once all these conversion metrics dropto the bottom, what have we learned about the ones that are still pending and then harvest that feedback into funnel metrics. That’s closing the loop analytically.” -Frank “Closing it in terms of what’s left on the cutting room floor, we do have a couple of AI features that are going to look at meeting declines and go back to them with comments like, “Hey, I saw you just declined this meeting, was that an issue around the timing or something about you’re not ready to buy now. Any feedback is welcome.’ What we have seen in those declines is 10-20% of what otherwise wouldn’t want a meeting, saying, ‘No, it’s fine. You were just sending me content about the hardware and I have aquestion about security.’ And that is an opportunity.” -Frank“AI gets smarter as you go, so each time we’ve got enough cases of, ‘Sorry, Fridays don’t work for me, can we do Monday?’, the AI gets a little smarter and equally, if we get too many of themsaying, ‘Don’t send me early morning meetings or you keep talking to me about software and I want to talk about security’, That can be built back into the Kronologic instances of AI.” -Frank“There’s a lot of pontification about how qualified a given lead or a given opportunity is, but there’s a lot of value in calendar acceptance as a qualification. What we really want to know at the time is, is this person ready to have a conversation. If they are willing to accept the meeting and take time, that is the ultimate signal that this is a good time to connect with them and if they don’t, it’s a pretty strong indication that they are not ready and they’re not qualified.” -Aaron “I think that’s an important part as we start to think about the feedback loopand really the success after the Last Mile. You can drive more meetings but actually more meetings give you more data to gauge who are the best possible customers. It feedbacks into your lead scoring and helps you understand who should you have meetings with.” -Ben“Just as Kronologic is the world’s first active scheduling platform, we are also the world’s first calendar monetization engine. With Kronologic’s AI plugged into your calendar, not only are we helping them book it out for you but we are actively looking at the estimated value of each meeting, using the Meeting Math framework and we’re using that to help prioritize meetings within your calendar.” -Aaron “If the estimated value of a given meeting is a thousand dollars but the estimated value of another meeting is 5,000 dollars, that more valuable meeting will have some prioritization in terms of how we schedule it and when we try to get to it and also potentially who takes that meeting.” -Aaron “If you have a particular seller that closes deals a lot, more of the time, we have routing we call ‘Feed the Beast’ that enables companies to actually have some of the best and most valuable meetings teamed up for some of the best sales reps.” -Aaron “What we are seeing is that, this type of technology provides the ability to see and actually quantify, what is happening at that critical part of the revenue funnel where leads have to convert to meetings. It provides really strong feedback for marketers.” -Frank“Essentially, marketers can test a hypothesis. Take a hundred leads from one stream and take a hundred from another, and run that through Kronologic and see how many meetings come out on the other side. That gives you a really good indication of how valuable a given lead stream is, and it also allows sales leaders to plan appropriately in terms of where they put resources and time to nurturing those leads and working them into the pipeline and ultimately revenue.” -Aaron “As I think about sales enablement in general, my takeaways from our conversations this week, oddly enough the metaphor that comes to mind is ice skating. To me, when you think about your sales funnel, the thinnest part of the ice is the handoff between sales and marketing, when you’re getting someone who is raising their hand and you need to be moving quickly to make sure that that lead doesn’t fall through the thin ice.” -Ben