My top learnings from RevGenius’ RevCon 2022

RevCon 2022 in the books. I can still hear that catchy RevCon rap now as you enter the main stage. 

Though a fully virtual event, I was happy to see the RevGenius community was as vibrant and fun as their raps, full of hungry sales, marketing, and revenue professionals looking to step it up in their careers. 

For our first year attending, we were very excited to introduce Avoma to the RevGenius community as a Super Gold Sponsor. I, and I’ll speak for the rest of the team, enjoyed meeting everyone and learned so much from all the great speakers. 

If you missed the event, no worries. Luckily for you, it was virtual and I have put together some of my favorite moments and resources you may have missed.

So what were the best RevCon sessions you missed?

The conference had digital booths and networking sessions, but most people were there for the speakers and panels. There were pleasantly interesting topics ranging from Sales, RevOps, customer success to marketing.

I appreciated the fact that these speakers were real people out there every day in the SaaS trenches. There’s nothing worse than wasting 30 minutes listening to sessions that only skim the surface, “know your buyer” or ”solve the problem” type of talk. Give us actionable tips we can use today!

For SDRs and Sales

The Future of Prospecting

Prospecting can feel like a daunting task but the excitement and energy from this panel was undeniable. They even had some inside jokes by the end of it. #DontBeACreep 

Back to seriousness, they went into detail on outbound strategies that work for them—what prospects to focus on, what triggers to set up, all the way down to key things they put in the message, and how to make social selling work.

This panel was moderated by the one and only Jared Robin, Co-founder at RevGenius. Panelists were: 

• Landon Meyer, SDR Coach and Co-founder of The Prospecting Club 
• Daisy Chung, Director of Sales @ Orum
• Amelia Taylor, Lead Evangelist & GTM Sales Strategy @ Regie.ai
• And of course, our own Lindsay Mullins, Account Executive @ Avoma

TL;DR: 3 outbound trends to win more deals

#1 Join social communities (7:56)

Hit your numbers so you can test and get creative with finding prospects. Amelia talked about how 90% of what she closes today is just being involved in Slack communities and meeting people in huddles. Know your ICP (ideal customer persona), go find communities they’re involved in, and join the conversation. 

Get creative with where you do your outreach. Slack and LinkedIn communities are already filled with your ICPs and they enjoy being there. Before you start pitching everyone in the group and get booted, really be genuine with your conversations and try to learn the challenges that people are facing. Is what you’re saying of value to your ICP and can you build relationships?

#2 Helping is selling. Selling is helping. (12:30)

People can smell the sales pitch and tend to ignore it once they figure that out. It’s more effective to solve their problem than it is to just sell to anyone—and they are going to be more likely to stay with the brand.

It’s a lot easier when you meet them in a community or you know something about them (e.g. an award they just won). Lindsay made a great point where you may have your preferred method of contact such as texting, calling, emailing, or commenting on their post. Your goal is to meet prospects where they want to be met. Also, be consistent with your cadence and message so that you’re memorable.

If you’re showing up there to ‘take, take, take’, you can’t expect someone to give. Find common ground. Congratulate them on any successes. Build relationships.

If you want to deep dive further into the world of thoughtful prospecting, Lindsay has written an entire blog dedicated to the topic.

#3 Building your personal brand on social organically leads to selling (15:03)

Building a personal brand is no easy task, and it may take a year or two to even see any traction. Investing in yourself now and staying consistent will lead you to a compound effect later on. Creating content around your ideal persona is going to be a lot more impactful than just selling.

Start interesting conversations on different social platforms, tell a joke, and test what lands. Organic reach from platforms like Linkedin and TikTok is growing and it’s completely free to tap into.

Wait…isn’t this just setting yourself up with your own inbound channel for outbound prospecting? 🤯

Olivia Wainhouse, Senior Account Executive at Avoma, recently reposted a funny Linkedin post from marketing and it blew up. She actually brought in a huge account because of this prospecting technique.

By the way—if you want to level up your prospecting game on LinkedIn, you might want to consider building an effective LinkedIn content strategy.

For Marketing

Build a Memorable Brand

B2B marketing does not have to be boring. We typically see B2C marketers embrace more creativity and risks to make their brand memorable to consumers and we can learn a lot from them. At the end of the day, you are still marketing to real people who have real lives, desires, and interests even if you are marketing to the B2B audience. 

ClickUp’s Chief Creative Officer, Melissa Rosenthal, goes over some tips for  leaving a lasting impression on your brand. She discusses the value of storytelling and shares the biggest risks she took which made the biggest impact. And the best part is, they did it all in-house which means you don’t always need a crazy budget to stand out.

Speaker: Melissa Rosenthal, Chief Creative Officer @ ClickUp

As a marketer myself, I loved this session. Here are a few of my favorite points Melissa talked about:

Establish a personality from day 1 (5:10)

For marketing teams, the goal is to humanize the brand so people can relate to you. It goes beyond spending a bunch of money on reaching people but delivering a feeling or experience that is going to be memorable. Take some time to figure out what your brand persona really is.
For ClickUp, they used self-awareness and humor to invite people into the narrative versus the typical seriousness that comes with most B2B corporate brands.

Think outside the box for what you can create (10:28)

You really need to look in-house to see what your strengths are and expose them in your marketing. It may just start with the small decisions you make every day ranging from email copies to the tweets you send out. Ask yourself—how can you be different?

You have to experiment with what works for your audience! If one out of five experiments work, you are killing it.

Here’s a video campaign ClickUp did in-house using humor to resonate with what people were currently going through—returning to the office. 

People buy from people (17:55)

Enable people inside your company, your community, and your fans to talk about your brand—it starts from within. Think of your own employees' media channels. It’s a win-win. They build up their personal brand and you build more reach for the brand. 80% of reach on LinkedIn is due to 20% of the efforts that you put on creating good content—don’t overthink it.

Your community can be your moat. Your champions, your fans, and your customers are your most valuable asset. Go above and beyond for them. Build ambassador programs. Create special moments with them to make them feel valued and let them spread the word about how great your brand is.

Here’s an example that Melissa shared during her session to showcase how ClickUp social team goes above and beyond to woo their customers:

For Founders/CEOs

Optimizing GTM for PLG

Many believe product-led companies will dominate SaaS in the next 10 years. But what product-led strategies separate the unicorns from the rest? 

Mark Roberge shares his research at Harvard Business School on what the top PLG companies in the world have in common, and areas where GTM leaders fall short.

Speaker: Mark Roberge, Managing Director @ Stage 2 Capital

Though just the tip of the iceberg, here’s some actionable advice that you can start doing today to start behaving like the top product-led growth companies:

Measure free user retention (9:18)

The easiest way to measure this is to ask users “How disappointed would you feel if <product> no longer existed?” The magic number of “very disappointed” should be above 40%. Companies with less seem to struggle with growth.

The harder—but more reliable—way is to your weekly active users by monthly cohort. You can bring in more and more users every month, but if their activity eventually falls flat, you have a big problem.

Here’s an example of how companies like Superhuman and Sidekick measure free user retention differently.

Think like a scientist (12:36)

First, high-growth startups will use engineering time—sometimes half—to build infrastructure to run experiments. This leads the entire company to then think like scientists. 

The growth team develops a hypothesis and runs many different experiments to test its theory. Every week, they base what they do on the results of the recent experiments and what they learned.

Then a big miss is not segmenting your users! You can’t be everything to everyone. Make sure the results focus on your target buyer personas.

Design a sales comp plan designed for plus-led growth (22:45)

Most traditional comp plans for the sales team are optimized for the initial sale which makes sense when you are focused on bringing in revenue. Mark challenges this mindset as outdated if you are trying to execute a PLG strategy. 

In today’s date, the salesperson should be compensated more for the expansion than the first revenue from the customer. The focus should be on product adoption before any actual purchase—which has been proven to lead to a lower CAC and higher retention and expansion rates.

See you next year RevGenius!

Meeting the RevGenius community was so much fun and we can’t wait to continue the conversations we’ve had. See you all soon. :)

P.S. — Did you miss our digital booth by chance? No worries, again it was digital. So we’ll leave you with the video overview of Avoma that we shared with RevCon attendees.