Ep # 184: How to Use Client Intelligence to Build Trust in Technical Sales ft. Julie Barberio (VP of Client Solutions, Sequence Inc.)

Julie Barberio 00:04 Storytelling is something that is a skill, and it can be learned. You can fine tune and hone it. There are different ways and methods that you can learn how to communicate in a way that you know actually makes yourself sound smarter in the room. Intro 00:24 Welcome to Across the Funnel, where we dig into concrete Go-To-Market moves across sales, customer success, and account management so you can build revenue that lasts. Brought to you by Hyperengage and Dextego. Ioanna Onasi 00:41 Hi Julie, welcome to Across the Funnel. Lovely to have you here with us today. How are you? Julie Barberio 00:47 I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Ioanna Onasi 00:49 Awesome. It's a pleasure. I can't wait to learn more about your career. As I was checking you know your LinkedIn and doing some prep work, I saw you've been for 25 years in the marketing world. That's fascinating, because you've been various industries, from McDonald's now the Sequence, can you tell me what is a word that describes the early part of your career, a word that describes this part, and kind of how we went from that to this? Julie Barberio 01:21 Yeah, sure. I would say, gosh, the early part of my career was really focused on marketing fundamentals, like learning the basics of marketing, and then fast forward. I think it's more of a strategic mindset, setting marketing strategy now is the most important thing that I'm focused on these days. Ioanna Onasi 01:43 Awesome. And did you always know you want to get into marketing? Julie Barberio 01:47 You know what I actually did? So believe it or not, when I first graduated from high school, of all things, I worked at an ad agency all throughout college, and while I was in college, I just loved it. I gravitated to the idea of consumer behavior, and I knew that marketing was a direction that I wanted to focus on. So that was actually what I studied in school. Ioanna Onasi 02:11 Yeah, in a consumer behavior, especially with what's going on with AI, it's a very fascinating topic, like, how would you say that background in marketing has helped you now in your role in clients, relationships, client solutions, like, what is the takeaway that you use in this career? Julie Barberio 02:30 So I had a really interesting career from the standpoint of, when I first started to work for McDonald's corporate, it was actually for a franchise owner. So it's a lot of people don't realize that it's operator based. So there are individuals that own groups of stores. So I started my career really focused on a much more local and regional idea of marketing. I learned the basics of what it takes to market at McDonald's restaurant, and from the operations side at the corporate level, what that really meant when it came to an operations perspective. Fast forward to my transition to the corporate side of that business, I went to work for McDonald's USA, and that really challenged me, because it then turned into a global PR and brand engagement role. So going from that hyper focused local mindset to global organization, and what that means just was very eye opening. From there, I started with, I took a leap of faith and went to work for actually, a small startup. And in that startup, they were focused on providing client feedback for McDonald's, and it was an opportunity to potentially, you know, have that was back in the days of the whole IPO opportunity. And so I wore so many hats at that organization. But what I think my key takeaway from that experience was more so it was such a small team, you had to wear so many hats. I learned everything there was to know about sales from the standpoint of going from a massive corporate brand that everybody knows and has heard of, McDonald's, to trying to sell a brand that no one has heard of. So that was challenging transition. Fast forward to my days now. At Sequence, I went from selling a product to now I'm selling services, so that has become a very different mindset and challenge, primarily due to the fact that I'm now selling people and not hamburgers and french fries. And it's highly technical, Ioanna Onasi 04:47 Yeah. And it's very interesting. And you picked up all these different challenges in your career, and right now, I mean, selling people, I'm assuming it's all about trying to show that trust. How do you show trust through marketing in a world where people, I would say, don't really believe what they see anymore, when half of their faith is AI generated content like, what have you found to work? Julie Barberio 05:15 That's actually a really great question, and at Sequence, we're really focused on a relationship building strategy when it comes to the life sciences market, even though it seems like it's massive, what we find is that it's actually pretty small and close knit community. People that are focused on, that work in this industry, they all seem to know one another, they go from one company to another. So your reputation is everything, and having those trusted relationships really make the difference between someone that that wants to work with your team, versus, you know, they don't believe in what you're selling, if you will. Ioanna Onasi 05:58 And what does your team look like now, like, who do you work the closest with? Julie Barberio 06:03 Internally? So yeah, internally, we have a fairly lean team. But what I will say brings the biggest value is that everyone on our team we believe in, like this unicorn salesperson strategy. So they're people that come from the field, if you want to call it that, so they all have a highly technical expertise and background, and what that does is that brings that level of natural conversation and technical understanding that really resonates with the client. They know that when they're having a conversation with someone from our team that they truly understand what that client is going through and what it's going to take to deliver a successful project. So we have a service delivery team that is focused on, you know, really providing that highest level of service with our clients. And then we also have a business development team, and we have someone based in our North-east Region, another one focused on the South-east. We're really nationwide and even global focused. But yeah, so we've got that. And then there's a small marketing team. Ioanna Onasi 07:19 Okay, so how do you align all these people? How do you align them on the messaging and that client relationship, the value selling component of the process, like, let's say I start working at your company today. What does onboarding look like? Julie Barberio 07:35 Yeah, so we are focused on placing our engineering consultants on our client sites. So one unique strategy that we use is that we train our team members the moment that we hire them, we put them through a very stringent hiring process, and then once they are finally onboarded, we have a multi week training program that's very different and unique in the industry. Our consultants, we believe that with the right cross functional technical background and understanding that's going to allow them to deliver a different type of service that doesn't compare to our competitors. Yeah. So, so that's probably the biggest thing when it comes to our business development team. What that really looks like is you bring in someone that already has the technical expertise and understanding. From there, we hire based on a focus on our core values. So we have what's called attitude, aptitude and initiative. We hire based on attitude more than anything, and the initiative piece, if they don't show that they have the capacity for those two components, we know we can train them on the technical skill set, but you cannot train on some of those soft skills. So it's really important that they have those skill sets already internally as part of who they are. Ioanna Onasi 09:08 Although I would claim, yeah, absolutely, these are the most important skills everybody should be hiring for. But they are trainable. They are coachable to certain extent, of course, but I think you can learn you know how to communicate better, negotiate, better, sell better, and it takes practice, and someone needs to want to do it. I think that's the skill like, do you want to are you curious? Are you hungry to learn? Then, yeah, I can teach you. But if you don't want then that's another step. Julie Barberio 09:38 Absolutely right. And you know, that raises a really great point. You know, every single one, we have hundreds of consultants that are out there in the field. They are the primary front facing sales development team, if you will, that works with our clients on a daily basis. So we even have an initiative going right now. Now where we are traveling around to visit with all of our teams at the client site to make sure that they have the full understanding of our full service offering like, what does our messaging look like? What are our differentiators? What are the things that they should be looking for on that client site that we can further develop and establish that partnership even deeper, anticipate what will the client need 12 months from now, 18 months from now, just continually keeping that mindset of open understanding and paying attention so that we're there to be able to provide that solution and fill that need. Ioanna Onasi 10:40 Yeah, that's very important. I love that they're going in person, and it sounds like they are focused on doing continuous discovery, like they keep asking the right questions to build that relationship and see where the gaps are. So can you talk to me more about how they prepare for these meetings? Like, are they looking more into the account? Are they trying to figure out the person like on LinkedIn? Like, what is the process like for them to show up confident that I know who I'm dealing with? Julie Barberio 11:08 Right. Yeah, no, I consider client intelligence one of our superpowers. What, what is so important to your point is, you know, especially if it's a person that you have not met with yet, doing your background checking, like understanding you know, you can check in on their LinkedIn. Where did they come from previously? What does their career path look like? What are some of the things that are going to maybe resonate with them? Who else in the industry are they may be connected to that we're connected to, she can really build that relationship bond with that client, and that really helps establish that trust and really bring forward, you know, the things that are going to matter to them. In addition to that, mean you can do the same thing from from the perspective of their organization. Big part of my job as Client Solutions is constantly paying attention to industry news. What is happening with, you know, new drug delivery announcements.? What with today's hyper, massive growth that's going on? What are the new markets that we need to be paying attention to? What are the expansion opportunities, and how can we be there at the right time to have that conversation that can lead to a great partnership and support to meet that client's needs? Ioanna Onasi 12:33 And for that customer intelligence like, have you used any external like AI tools for this, or have you built things internally like, what are you leveraging to figure these things out? Julie Barberio 12:44 Yeah. I mean, if anybody isn't using AI yet, they're already way behind, aren't they? So to that point, yes, we use everything from, you know, industry publications and announcements, there are internal, not internal, but privately held industry intelligence platforms that we subscribe to that give us the early insight and input into not only what projects are coming, but who the contacts and connections are that we need to be focused on with relation to approaching that, that client opportunity, in addition, yeah, I mean, it's things like LinkedIn, it's having conversations with the different partners and other companies that we have established partnerships with. You know, when we know, you know, there's a big construction management firm that we found out is the one that has been selected to build that new client site, that new pharmaceutical site. We give them a call like, Hey, tell us more about what you see as the need that this client has. What's going to be most important to them considering is it a cell and gene therapy company, because they're not going to have as much money. So we maybe focus on providing, you know, a different level of service that maybe takes a little bit longer, you know, it's a more considered approach to the cost of that project that we know will be most important to them versus a big biopharma company that's trying to get their drug to market the fastest. You know, everybody's talking about all these GLP one drugs. So a lot of the clients that we're working with, you know their focus is to get to that market first with that product, because if they're delayed or if they're late, that gives that next drug company that opportunity to go to market first, and it's going to put them behind. Ioanna Onasi 14:46 Yeah, so interesting. I feel like you've nailed the prep portion of sales, for sure. I want to get your thoughts on something, because to me, it's more about how you say something rather than what you say. And it's very important that sellers, especially nowadays, that Legion becomes very hard like to nail the first interaction we have, literally, like three seconds before someone makes a unbiased or biased choice whether they want to keep going right in this conversation. So where my company index exists in AI coaching platform for sales, and where we focus is on the understanding basically who you're speaking to and trying to tailor your message. So taking your background, I thought that's very interesting to to get your thoughts on this. What I see is that sometimes people have their script, they nail the peaks, but they underestimate that the person on the other screen takes the information through a different lens. For instance, I might be an analytical or I might be a storyteller, it will resonate differently, right? So what we do is we have a Chrome extension that analyzed a lot of the things you mentioned, like LinkedIn, Google searches, and basically creates a confidence score on who this person is, to guard you on how to speak. So I ran it before the call for you. I want you to tell me if you think it's accurate for you, and I'll share my screen to show you what it says. So in this scenario, basically you are the buyer, so we have an 88% compatibility match in our communication style, and that's because it's able to understand your disk profile. Compare it to mine. Your Ocean or else Big Five compared to mine. So would you say, I mean, I think from talking to you, this is very accurate, but do you say that you have high influence, meaning your social, persuasive, expressive? Julie Barberio 16:53 I have done this DISC profile test, and I can tell you that that has come in as the absolute highest skill that I have, very that's absolutely accurate. Ioanna Onasi 17:06 And would you say you're agreeable and conscientious, which means that you like structure, planning. You probably have your to-do lists, and you you like to work with others who have high empathy. Julie Barberio 17:23 100%. I mean that that nails it for me, but I will say that with that in mind, I love my checklist, I love my to do list, but I also am pretty flexible, like I can shift as needed so that I'm not, you know needing to be regimented. Ioanna Onasi 17:42 And we all learn to I think especially at work, you have to be flexible. But it's interesting, right? How, like AI, can, in seconds, find all these things and tell us a bit about who we're meeting before we jump into the call, because you can't afford to not know who you're meeting. Like buyers expect you come in with a solution, and you know what you're talking about. So I think especially in consultive sales, that's so important. So I was wondering if you do any training on these things as well, like you were talking earlier, about, like all the industry trends, knowing anyway, what's going on. But how about how to approach that human is it that you hire only like senior consultants, that they already know how to do this, or is there some training internally? Julie Barberio 18:30 Okay, so that raises a very interesting point where our business model is concerned. So we are actually focused on hiring new college graduates, because one of the unique things about our business model is that we have built a mock pharmaceutical manufacturing training facility so that we can build and train our own internal team. We saw that in the pharmaceutical industry, there is expected to be a 30% talent deficit by the year 2030 we saw that coming, and we had already experienced the idea and the reality that we could not find the trained talent that we wanted and that we deemed acceptable for who we wanted to present as our engineering consultants. So we thought, if we can't find the right people, let's build them. And so we established, built, invested millions in this hands on training facility that is very unique in our industry. We have a lot of competition, and none of them are doing what we're doing. So with that, though, you can imagine bringing in a younger audience like that, a new they're fresh out of college. They don't have the maturity and the experience of having worked in, you know, a company environment before, a professional environment. So part of our training, in addition to the technical skill set, is soft skills training. We're teaching them and training them how to, what is considered a professional email. How do you interact professionally on the project site? You don't listen to your headphones. You don't put your feet on the desk. You take initiative. You don't sit around and wait to be told what to do you are actively reaching out to that client representative and saying "Hey, I'm finished with this particular part of the project. Is there anything else I can do to support you?", that sort of thing. So that's been actually, we've learned that a little bit along the way through having some of those specific examples occur, and so that's become embedded as part of our training for our team. Ioanna Onasi 20:46 That's amazing. How long does that usually take? Like, as a first graduate, when would you say I would be ramped up. Julie Barberio 20:54 The talent acquisition process like it can it starts, obviously, from the very beginning, it can take up to a month to get someone actually onboarded. And then we have a multi week training program, so it's anywhere from four weeks to eight weeks, depending on client demand. Ioanna Onasi 21:13 Okay, yeah, fascinating. And I think these are all like small habits, you know, they learn that eventually lead up to them having more influence, because it's not just making you good salaries. Can you persuade the champion in the account to do something on your behalf? Do you show up with gravitas, even as a junior person speaking to a C suite like these are really the skills that make or break the deal at the end of the day, and the fact that you were able to simulate this environment that is so realistic, it's amazing, like you are already so many steps ahead. So that's a great thing to know and get ideas from for other industries that they're seeing sorted in talent, because I'm sure there are others. It's a global problem. But also, let's, let's move on a little bit on career advice that you have for younger folks, talking about young graduates that are trying to get into marketing, because right now, the times are very different, like they are coming into a place where it's very hard to find a junior role when AI can do a lot of the things we know, from copy to writing landing pages and all these things. So what do you think is something that young graduates should focus on and prioritize, maybe in those skill building years that you were able to, you know, take your time to learn, like the fundamentals we're saying, and they don't have a bandwidth because they need to find a job and no one is hiring them. What's your advice? Julie Barberio 22:40 Yeah, oh gosh. I mean, that is absolutely one of the, the most difficult questions that I feel for the new graduates and the younger people that are trying to break into the business, especially marketing. You know, a lot of the work that that we are doing is being, can be taken over by AI, and is be take being taken over. I reflect on my career and even the way that I'm doing my job today, I'm a lot of my technical writing, we're using AI SEO. We're not using outside services any longer. What I will say is that when it comes to advice for someone that's coming in, how can they learn to leverage the tools that are that are now available to us, really marketing themselves personally on LinkedIn, you know, leveraging AI to make sure that their resume is as polished as it can be, making sure that their LinkedIn profile is as polished as it can be, I find that a lot of the current younger generation coming into the business, they are not always keen to have personal interactions and do direct outreach. I received an email this week, in fact, from a high school student, of all things that were they were looking for a summer internship. This is the first time this has happened to me, and they they had the initiative to reach out and say "This is who I am. These are the skills and certifications that I'm currently working on. I would love to have an opportunity to be an intern with your organization". That stood out to me in a way that you just don't experience and see any longer. It's not as common. I forwarded it on to our training team. And I said, I don't necessarily have a place on the marketing side of things right now, but this person with their level of initiative and their technical skill set that they're working on, and I think that this is somebody worth looking at, for sure. Ioanna Onasi 24:55 Yeah, I so much agree with your advice. I think literally, the number one skill. All in this AI era is storytelling, like how you give the story about yourself and why you want this job to how you're learning different things to adjust in the market. Like it's all about explaining in a way that captivates the audience. And I think by default, the younger we are, the more of that we do naturally, because we live in La La Land most of the times, right? But the more we grow up, unfortunately, we're pushed into different playbooks and how people think is the right way to go about your story. So if anything, I would encourage young marketers to take that as a compliment and understand that is in them, and it's more about connecting the dots, and really, like you're saying, leveraging the skill set and becoming more strategic. It's not like specific skills they need to know so much like SEO or this or that. It's more, how can I show that I have something to add in a marketing team that might use 10 agents next to me, how to differentiate myself from others that just have the separate skills, like, what's my unique point of view? Yeah, it's really easy when we say that. It's much harder, but because there is an attention economy we live in that we literally have two three seconds to capture someone. But my advice is that like trying to figure out what's your unique POV. Julie Barberio 26:25 And you know what that is such such a smart comment, because storytelling is something that is a skill. It can be learned. You can fine tune and hone it. There are so many tools out there now, whether it's taking a master class through LinkedIn or studying and learning from storytellers that I'm seeing on social media, they're on Tiktok, they're on Instagram, there are different ways and methods that you can learn how to communicate in a way that you know actually makes yourself sound smarter in the room, and allows you to ask great questions and really set you up and set you apart once you finally land that job and help you in that interview process to, as you said, set yourself apart. So I think that's a really great point. Ioanna Onasi 27:18 At the end of the day, we all have learned what the good story looks like from movies, right? It's the classic hero's journey. Like, what is that moment in time something happened, the struggle that you figure it out. This is what people think in our DNA. Like, I feel like it's even like we connect with people who struggle and then they make it we don't like bad endings, so whatever you do, make your story have a happy ending. Yeah. So what is the best advice you've got them now in your career Julie? Julie Barberio 27:49 Gosh, so in my days at McDonald's, it was extremely high pressure. I mean, there the position that I was in and the team that I worked on. It was a small but mighty team we relied heavily on, like top notch agencies, but knowing and understanding that the work that we were doing had the ability to impact the McDonald's stock, if it wasn't managed carefully, was something that was always top of mind. So I will never forget. There was a time that we were working on this very highly time sensitive new product launch, and we had this clever PR scheme. So I was on the PR and brand engagement team. We worked closely with the marketing team to bring these new products to market. And we had this clever scheme that involved like this funny little toy that was going to help us sell these special like the new fresh beef hamburgers that we had, and we were trying to source this PR item overseas. And like, things were becoming challenging. We were going to miss deadlines, and it was becoming frustrating, and we felt like we were not going to make it. I came into the meeting with my director, and she said, and we were telling her problems, problems, this is wrong, that's wrong. And she's like "You know what? Don't come to me with the problems. Come to me with solutions. You can acknowledge those problems, but come here and talk to me and tell me about the ways that you have looked at this problem from all the different angles, and what are the things that we're going to do to make this thing happen?". And you know what? For I took so much away from that, and guess what? It all worked out at the end of the day, like we had. It was a highly successful launch. We met the. Line. It was close, like it was touch and go, but like, we made it, we did it. So yeah, that was that. It still sticks with me today. Don't focus on the problem only from the standpoint of, how can you come up with a solution to overcome it? Julie Barberio 27:49 That's what differentiates the average from the high performers, right? How proactive are you? And you do your boss's job, and they just can look good at the end of the day. That's what they want, right? That's awesome. Thank you so much for all your insights. It was such a pleasure to have you on Julie. Just to conclude, tell me what's one thing you're excited for? What are you looking for this month? Are you working on a new project? Anything exciting you want to share? Julie Barberio 30:48 I was excited when I saw that you had this topic on your list of things you wanted to discuss, because, as I stated before, one of the thing we have a tremendous amount of competition for the work that we do. So I took a step back. We're selling these highly technical services to pharmaceutical companies. I've looked back at my days at McDonald's and how to build customer loyalty for hamburgers and french fries, and what I realized is that there is a connection between the ability to build brand loyalty for hamburgers and french fries and services in order to be able to differentiate ourselves. So we're taking a step back right now. We're hyper focused on brand loyalty, and what does that look like when it comes to being a differentiator? We're looking at every single touch point that we have with our clients that starts at the very beginning, with our business development team, with our interactions with them on social media, with our proposal specialist, with our accounting team, with the accountant, the consultants that we have on our project site, every interaction, we're taking a very close look at. How can we elevate that experience and ensure that every interaction that we have is at the highest level, and that our clients come away with the best possible attitude about the service that we provide, so that at the end of the day, even if our services cost a little bit more, that's because we offer more and they see that value. So yeah. Ioanna Onasi 32:28 At the end of the day, people buy from people. We know that. Julie Barberio 32:33 We don't trust. Ioanna Onasi 32:34 To give more money if it's worth it. Julie Barberio 32:36 Yes, that's right. That's right. Excellent. Ioanna Onasi 32:39 Well, good luck with everything, and thank you again for joining us. I appreciate it. Julie Barberio 32:43 Thank you so much for having me. Outro 32:45 Thank you very much for listening to Across the Funnel. If you got one useful GTM idea out of this show today, please share this with a teammate and hit follow. Explore Hyperengage at hyperengage.io and Dextego at dextego.com.