Tami leads content marketing and communications for the Atlanta based startup SalesLoft. Tami has nine years of marketing and communications experience. In only 9 months of starting at SalesLoft, she’s already made a huge impact at the growing startup. Tami’s published 66 blog posts, 12 videos, has grown SalesLoft’s Twitter following by 67% and most importantly she’s generated 7,171 leads via her content marketing…and she’s just getting warmed up. It’s no wonder that the Technology Association of Georgia recently named her as the 2014 B2B Marketing Innovator of the Year. We expect to see a lot more great B2B marketing from her in 2015.

Press play below and start listening to Tami McQueen share her B2B content marketing insights with us, on this week’s podcast:

The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/salesloft

Beginning of Transcript

Tami McQueen: Absolutely, Jeff. I am the Director of Marketing over at SalesLoft and we are the easiest and fastest way on the internet to build a targeted and accurate list of prospects. It is the biggest innovation to happen to the sales process. So sales development is absolutely changing the way a traditional sales team works. So what for example we do is we focus on the art of specialization. A team of sales development reps who use Prospector, our product, to prospect leads and then pass those over to the account executives who focus solely on closing the deal.

Tami McQueen

Jeff Zelaya: Now Tami, I’ve seen you guys really leverage content extremely well and that’s how I’ve heard of you because all the social buzz, the blogs that you guys are putting out, the best practices, the tips, tricks techniques, your newsletter, so much awesome stuff coming from the SalesLoft team. How has content helped you grow? Do you attribute any of your success to the content that you guys are producing?

Tami McQueen: Yeah, Jeff. So content marketing is our second way, only behind outbound prospecting, that we generate leads. We use sales development for outbound prospecting to generate leads – sales development team and the go-to source for sales development. So when you think of sales development and you think of prospecting, you think of SalesLoft and we have focused specifically on doing that through our content. To give you an example is we try not to be salesy per se in our blogs or our white papers or our ebooks. We want to provide our users as well as our prospects with the most valuable piece of content to get their hands on. We released earlier this year and have updated on a month to month basis our very own internal sales development playbook.

This is an outline strategy that we hand to every new sales development rep that started SalesLoft and we wanted to share that with all our clients, prospects, and perhaps people who could find it of use to their team as well. What we have done with this and to generate top of the funnel leads is to gate the content. We will create the landing page and share through a marketing mix to send folks to this landing page where they can download the playbook. It is free. We ask for their name and email address. That counts as a new unique lead independent of sales development outreach. It allows us to track and to understand the buyer’s process for our lead generation.

Jeff Zelaya: I am thrilled to see a lot of transparency this past year. A lot of the best B to B marketers are very transparent in their approach and they’re eating their dog food, much like SalesLoft is doing, and they’re sharing. Here’s how we use it. Here are the best practices and all that great content gets people really reeled in and they’re excited to see the results and to share and to talk about it.

Tami McQueen: Absolutely. We have really and truly found great traction in the blogs that we have shared that look at our compensation model. We are completely transparent with what we comp our reps. We are completely transparent on how many SDRs, sales development reps you need to the ratio of account executives you need. We are completely transparent in this and also in our hiring. We’re looking specifically for folks who punch above their weight loss, who are in the top one percent of all candidates out there. We are completely transparent with this and it’s funny you say that there has been a rise in this transparency. People are really eating their own dog food or drinking their own Kool-Aid and it really goes to show that that is what people resonate so well with. It’s that transparency. It’s almost like they can connect on the same level.

Jeff Zelaya: People like to see that and it really makes them I think more likely to do business with you. I think that’s a great marketing tactic and strategy. What else has been valuable to the SalesLoft team? Any other marketing tactics that you’ve used this past year that have been very well received? One of them in particular – I don’t know if this is the one that you’re going to talk about. But one of them that I did hear a lot of buzz around is – was how you guys did an amazing job of impersonating Marc Benioff at the Salesforce conference. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that. But in general, what has been your most valuable tactics this past year?

Tami McQueen: Jeff, you stole the words right out of my mouth. This is exactly what I was going to share with you and we were leading up to Dreamforce. We had no idea what we were going to do. We’re a first time sponsor, a rookie experience, at the ultimate conference in tech and we were looking at what we could do. We sat around the table, turning over every possible swag item. We thought about renting a hotdog cart and selling hotdogs and peddling through the streets, handing out flyers and giving demos on the back of a bicycle. We thought of it all.

We thought it was impossible. It will never work. But we thought we would give it a shot anyway. We put out an ad on Craigslist, specifically in the Bay Area. Didn’t think much of it, but we were getting closer to the events and we still didn’t have our Benioff. He is a very specific-looking gentleman and there’s not a hundred Elvises running around or other impersonators that are easy to find. Eventually we found a guy that was recommended to us in Atlanta, called him up, told him we weren’t kidding and he needs to get on the plane with us to San Francisco. We choose. We saw – the shoes he was going to wear. I went off to the Hobby Lobby and Michaels and Costco and got some glitter and dulled up the shoes a little bit. We were getting ear pieces and we sat at breakfast one day and we were ready to go tackle the events and we had a few mimosas in us and off we went. We had our director of sales dress up like a bodyguard and I’m sure you’ve seen from the photos. It was quite an adventure. We were absolutely scared to death. We completely owned it. We eventually got into character and we were walking around and got a lot of buzz, a lot of traction and we thought it was a success the first day. We didn’t want to stay out there too long.

The second day, we come back and I think we’ve got this. We walked past Marc giving an interview with our Marc and we thought, “Oh no! We’ve blown it.â€Â So we walk back to our booth area and eventually we see a few hours later Marc with his whole crew chatting to some of the platinum level sponsors and we thought this is it. This is the only way we’re going to do this but we’re going to have to go after him and we’re going to have to introduce ourselves somehow or another. We have to do this.

It turns out I – we spoke to his PR agent and a lot of these handlers and they had known about the Craigslist ad. They had been following us the past two days, what we were up to, what we were tweeting about, what we were sharing on social and we had an opportunity to meet face to face with Marc and he was great. He really received it really well. He laughed it off and said thanks for taking the weight off his shoulders, for attending some of the press events. So that generated a lot of buzz. We were at the SalesLoft booth as well and it was really greatly shared on social. So I can’t tie it directly and tell you what the ROI is. It’s one of those marketing campaigns that you can’t put a dollar amount on. But I will say that our website traffic that week shot up by 10,000 unique visitors.

Jeff Zelaya: Excellent. I mean that’s just an amazing story because you guys did really go outside of the box completely and that beats any type of swag that you will get at an event, being able to see that in action. So hats off to you guys for executing upon such a wonderful tactic. What are some of the ideas that you think will happen going into the new year that you guys are looking at? Maybe those – I know those are some of the like spur of the moment type of ideas. But what are some things that you definitely have implemented into your plan as a valuable tactic that you guys are going to execute in 2015?

Tami McQueen: Content, content, content. We are really focused on producing consistently on our blog, white papers, ebooks, and pieces that are of value, some case studies as well. I really think one of the trends – you asked this question – is that we will see for marketing, is really becoming more people-focused. We’re going to really gain a better understanding of our audience and this is going beyond just push, push, push of information out there. Gone are the days where you produce content and you throw it up on the blog or you put it on social media and people come. Those days are over. It’s about engagement. It’s about segmentation based on people’s interests and preferences. But really creating and delivering the right content for the right person at the right time every time and sharing videos. I think video for us is definitely going to be very impactful and with a lot more social platforms adopting video for engaging and user-generated content. We’re really going to try and leverage more of video to quickly create the content, to reach our audiences in real time.

I think that will be very impactful. We will continue a lot of our marketing automation that we do through drip campaigns. We share a lot of our top blogs in this fashion as well as product updates, engagements as well, so not only in the prospect stage but also in the client’s satisfaction, client’s success and client’s engagement as well.

Jeff Zelaya: You guys have actually been using video. I love the way that – for example with the new product of SalesLoft, Cadence. Instead of giving me an entire email text of how this product works, you said, “Here’s a link for the video. Go watch it.â€Â I watched it. I love it. The guy in the lab coat explaining how it works. It was very creative. Again, something that you guys are really good at and you were able to explain the product I think a lot better than a blog post would have given it justice. It was just way – very well-executed, well-done, and another – an example of how you guys are innovative and using video as a way of really interacting with people at a higher level.

Tami McQueen: Sure. Jeff, a lot of B to B companies in the tech space don’t have the luxury of being or having the impact of an Apple brand. Apple has the logo that they throw up and the date of a product launch. Very, very few companies have the luxury of doing that and being effective. What we wanted to do is to share a video that would be engaging but share very, very little content about it. Send them directly to the action that they needed to click on and engage in and see how that works. We really felt that it was something off the cuff, something very, very different having this go to market strategy of something that’s completely bizarre but the SalesLoft scientists and telling a story. What we have truly found to be most effective is telling a story well. Not just story telling but really telling a story that is engaging, that people want to hear more. That is almost as if you are encouraging to join a series. Think of your bloggers and mini series. Think of it as a pilot of a television series where people come back every single week to read it and that’s really and truly where an effective storytelling initiative comes into play.

Jeff Zelaya: Wow, I love that comparison and the analogy of making your content more like a really well-received – like Breaking Bad where you’re on the edge of your seat and you’re wondering what’s going to happen next. What’s going to happen on the next episode? You go online and you talk about it and you can’t wait. So yes …

Tami McQueen: Exactly. And the buzz around social media is electric when you have a season finale. That’s exactly what we want to create when we’re sharing and it’s tough. It’s not easy but that’s what your mindset truly needs to be.

Jeff Zelaya: Tami, besides of course your team, what are some other teams out there in the B to B space that you think are doing it really well, that are leaders, that are innovators, that are doing that type of approach where they’re keeping their audience very engaged and wondering, hey, what will they do next? What are some of the brands that come to mind?

Tami McQueen: Salesforce Pardot has an excellent content marketing strategy. Their blog is topnotch and also Salesforce.com’s blog is really strong in both the sales and marketing areas. They have a very strong niche market and our CEO Kyle Porter was the number one blogger on Salesforce last year, so a very impactful brand. I will also say DocuSign is really, really strong in their content. SaaStr has a great blog. Love to read that. The Funnelholic is one of my favorites. Those folks are really doing it well in content marketing and I’m an avid subscriber as well.

Jeff Zelaya: Tami, before we let you go, any last minute advice for directors of marketing that are in the same position that you were about a year ago, right? Starting a startup, very little maybe resources available right away and you just have to be different. Think outside the box and execute, execute, execute throughout the process. So any word of advice for someone that’s in that same role right now that’s listening to this? That’s wondering, wow, Tami is awesome. I want to do what she has been able to do. What would you give them as the best advice that you have to share?

Tami McQueen: The best advice I can give is to really understand who your market is. Understand their pain points and how you can help them. You want to be a pain reliever. You want to be able to show them how you can be of use to them and how they need you every single day, how you can share with them, understand what they are going through, understand how your product best aligns with their difficulties as well and how you can be a solution to them.

End of Transcript 

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