#MoneyBallMarketing With Scott King
AI for sales is still a bit of a nebulous term. Yet, some companies have undeniably utilized AI for their marketing and even reaping the results they wanted. Chad Burmeister sits down with Scott King, Director of Pipeline at Zimperium, to talk about how Zimperium leverages AI for marketing. In particular, Scott talks about Moneyball marketing, defining for us what it is and how they use it with AI for automation. Taking us into his life, he also shares his journey into the industry and how he stays on top of his game.
Listen to the podcast here:
Listen to the podcast here:
#MoneyBallMarketing With Scott King
Scott King, Director Of Pipeline At Zimperium, Shares How Zimperium Leverages AI For Marketing
I'm here with Scott King. He has the coolest title that I've ever come across in years and that is, Director of Pipeline. Scott, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Chad.
What an amazing time in the world with the advent of AI. I guess it's been out for decades, but it's starting to come to the forefront of sales and marketing. This episode’s topic is Moneyball Marketing and we're going to define what that is for you. Scott puts out an amazing marketing blog and weekly newsletter. He does webinars. I would love for you to check out his information. If you don't have the book, AI For Sales, it's available at Amazon.com. It has 21 chapters and 21 different categories of companies that leverage AI. Everybody from the data providers in chapter one all the way through to social selling AI in chapter 21. It's a great short, quick read. I'm told that over 5,000 copies were sold. Tell us about your company and do you leverage AI in your sales and marketing motion at all in some area?
Do we leverage AI in sales and marketing or does the product do AI?
It could be both questions. Does the product use AI and do you use AI in your sales and marketing motion?
I'm the Director of Pipeline over at Zimperium and it is in the mobile security space. We make sure that your devices and apps are not unprotected. We're looking for mobile apps that have vulnerabilities or risks when they're on third party devices. These would be like us if we use mobile banking. We also do device security. If you put a security app on your device, it will tell if you're being hacked or not. It does leverage AI, a whole lot of AI because the phone itself, Android phone or an iPhone, does not know if it's being attacked or not. We read all the usage statistics and all the metadata from the phone and we use AI to tell you if you're being hacked or not.
I have a friend from college that sent me one of those links in LinkedIn that said, “Here's the proposal you asked for.” I went through Facebook and said, “You may have been hacked.” She said, “I didn't send that to you.” It's prevalent. It happens to millions of people.
There's a lot of AI solutions that do phishing detection as well. We do phishing on mobile. If you click it on your mobile device, it’ll tell you if it's a good or bad link.
What about on the other side of it then? Are you using it in your sales and marketing motion?
We use AI when we have some marketing automation that would be AI. We're reading certain metrics from the website or a sales cadence to make decisions on the backend of what type of content to serve our visitors. We also use AI in our pipeline process to look at where are we getting revenue and where's the highest propensity prospect.
I heard of a company that starts with an M and ends with AI. I will leave the middle terms. They're still in stealth mode. This is a company that plugs into Eloqua and instead of a human doing the A/B testing, the AI looks across everything like what are the open rates, what type of verbiage is getting the best opens, clicks, and replies, what subject lines? It uses AI to optimize your deployment of Eloqua. I also know a guy here in Boulder who built an SEO company with eight people writing up the articles. He does this for big tech companies. He let the entire team of eight people go and he's using AI to write the articles. You can go in and type in AI for Sales, whatever the topics are that the keywords that need to be optimized for. The AI can write the article better than he found these eight people could write. It is a lot faster, better, and cheaper. Let's get to know you, Scott. Where did you grow up? Are you a Texan by birth? Where are you from?
I was born in Texas. I've lived nowhere else other than Texas. I am a native Texan. I do get a lot of questions on where I'm actually from because I don't have a huge accent and people expect that. I've always lived in Texas. I love it here. It's a big spot so there's lots of places to travel to and lots of things to do. I ride my bike all around Texas. I went to Texas Tech University out in Lubbock. I raced bikes out there. I studied engineering and advertising.
You leveraged a lot of those skillsets in the role you're in now.
The answer is already out there; you just have to ask the question.
I'm innately curious about stuff. I know a little than a lot, Cliff Clavin-like but my curiosity led me to the marketing side from sales. I started in sales.
Let's go back further. I've found that you start when you're young. You have a passion and then your parents influence you, your teachers, and everybody else in life. Before you know it, you're middle age and doing something that maybe you did or didn't love. I always find it curious that at age 5 or 6 is where your real passions were recreated. Taking off all those filters of life, what were you passionate about when you're 5, 6 or 7 years old?
At 5, 6 or 7, I was probably starting to ride my bike. I still do that. I used to hang out with my grandfather a lot and we would go fishing quite a bit. I'd go hunting with my dad. I was always tinkering with stuff. He was a general contractor. He would take us to job sites so we would see stuff being built. That was pretty cool. I was into a lot of different sports like playing soccer and riding bikes. I was not into reading. It was not a passion until later in life.
You were curious when you were younger, you're still curious and you leverage that curiosity as a skillset in your job you're in. I'd like to expose that to people that are younger in their careers because they maybe haven't decided what to do yet. If you can go back to your roots to when you're a kid, for me, it was being competitive. I held the rope climb record for six years in a row, first grade through sixth grade. Even when I was in college, I'd go back and I'd see my gym teacher, Mr. Trelfa, at church on a Sunday coming home for Thanksgiving. He would say, “You still hold the record.” Finally, it was a senior in college, he said, “Chad, bad news. You lost the fifth-grade record.” I've learned to parlay that level of competitiveness into sales and being the CEO of a company. Your curiosity, aligning your skills with what you're doing is important.
If people are curious and google everything because the answer is out there, you have to ask the question.
I did that. I said, “What's the market size for outsourced B2B?” Twenty minutes later, the CEO of a company called and said, “I've got all that for you. I'll send it.” I was like, “The AI was watching me.” AI for Sales is still a bit of a nebulous term. What is AI for Sales? Drill down, what do you mean by Moneyball Marketing?
Think about what your sales process is, no matter what it is, there are certain pinch points or friction points that are prevalent in your sales cycle. It could be creating proposals, writing content, making sales calls, or sending emails. Find out where those points are and look to leverage automation or artificial intelligence in those pinch points and do it one at a time. Make sure that you get one friction point, you remove that friction, and you move on. It's constraint-based optimization if you remember back from our ITU days.
The company that's going to be doing AP testing at scale on an A/B test basis done by the AI. What Scott's saying is, “You don't have to have AI to do that. You can do it on the A/B level. Let's test the subject line, the link of the email, then the data set.” I have an electrical problem at my home office and it's my birthday in a few days so I called my friend who’s an electrician in town and he said, “You have to narrow it down. Go to one outlet at a time and unplug it.” It's the same concept.
If you also increase the feedback cycle. I'm thinking of a big oil drum. You put a marble inside of an oil drum and spin it around. It takes a couple of seconds to go and make it around the drum. When I put the same marble in a teacup and see how fast you can roll it around, it’s some second. The marble is traveling at the same speed, but the feedback cycle is so much shorter than you get better and better results. Shorten your feedback cycle.
We already talked about Moneyball Marketing so let's move to the next one. I like to expose what are you using. It can be AI or not. Some of my reps on my team will say, “Chad, I don't know if that's AI.” I tell them, “I don't care if it's AI, BI, CI, or DI, as long as it's improving the process for a sales professional to get more meetings, book more Pipeline, and ultimately close more sales.” Are you using something that's helping you get an advantage over your competition or drive Pipeline?
We do have chatbots on the website. That's the most obvious form of AI because it's answering questions. I would tell people to use common sense because that is artificial intelligence. I don’t know why they call it common sense because it's not so common, but think with your head. I love LinkedIn. I love trying to figure out how the LinkedIn algorithm is working because it changes all the time. I've noticed that people have figured that out. There's also a cool tool for social called Sniply. It will do retargeting on your social posts. If someone clicks on a social post, it will place a pixel out there and do retargeting ads for them. I like that one too.
This is the last question, Scott, and we'll move forward. It goes back to your previous question to use common sense if you have a problem in a certain area. What have you found? If you're trying to discover new tools and technology, what do you do?
The sales professional is tough because the buyer has access to as much information as the sales professional. However, a lot of times the buyer is more educated than the sales pro because the buyer is doing the research and spending hours on it. I would encourage the sales pros to stay on top of your game, subscribe to a couple of newsletters, and making sure that you know relevant stories. From a tools perspective, automate stuff that you're already doing. Look at what you're doing all day. Look at how many times you click your mouse or hit your keyboard and figure out how to automate that stuff because it can be and that will save your time for other things.
Moneyball Marketing: No matter what it is, there are certain pinch points or friction points that are prevalent in your sales cycle.
AI for Sales to me is using automation to help automate those tasks that are repetitive and add very little to no value. There's a number of different data providers like ZoomInfo or SalesIntel that you can go and say, “Show me all the companies that deployed Salesforce that is $5 million to $10 million then export a list.” People still spend many hours manually hunting and pecking that information when it's available at your fingertips. How do we use AI to move our sales teams to the next level of professionalism and performance if things are about to get interesting? I had a call with Ben Simms from MarketSource, he tracks the red zone time and the green zone time.Customer-facing selling time is only about 33% but their goal as an organization from an outsourcing perspective is, “Our salespeople are in the green zone, 70% to 80% of the time. They only do red zone activities 20% of the time.” As a country and as a space of sales, sales and marketing need to get much better at leveraging the person to do the part of the job that they should be doing. I would never have my brother who's an anesthesiologist go out and recruit people to do anesthesiology on. He's there doing his thing. Salespeople are out recruiting people to do anesthesiology.
I like the green/red zone analogy. I would imagine that if a lot of people looked at their weekend and weekday schedules are red/green, they may be surprised because the weekends are packed full of stuff and were over-scheduled. Run your week like you do your weekend. If you have kids in sports, you're going to concerts, into dinner and you’re making friends. If you do twenty different things on a Saturday, you can do that Monday through Friday.
I'll leave everybody with one technology, Kronologic. They're a B2BMX and what they do is when it comes to the point of scheduling a meeting at a certain point in your cadence or sequence, or it's a white paper download. Imagine on a white paper download, you immediately got an automated calendar invite like, “Scott, I’m glad you downloaded the white paper. Here's the ten-minute intro conversation. I’d like to walk you through the white paper and blank.” Do something of value. They're seeing 3 to 4 times as many meetings booked by automating the meeting schedule process and not leaving it up to chance of a human because, we, as humans, may second guess when we should send the calendar invite out. The balance between pissing off the prospect because I downloaded a white paper and automating it, that'll be the balance but these guys are on to something. Scott, the Director of Pipeline from Zimperium. His company is AI to protect your mobile device. If you have a hacking problem, check out Zimperium. I appreciate your time, Scott.
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About Scott King
I help educate digital channel and mobile app owners on the inherent risks and threats to corporate and private information residing on over 6 million mobile apps and 9 billion mobile endpoints.If you have a question on mobile app market research, want a free mobile app vulnerability assessment, or want to go on a bike ride, then email me and I'll get back with you as soon as I can.★ email me - scott @ thescottking.com ★Specialties: Mobile Security, Mobile Threat Defense, Mobile App Security, App Shielding, Open Banking, PSD2, FinTech, Sales Operations, Continuing Education, Growth Mindset, and Mindfulness.
