Author name: Bill Kenney

Bill Kenney, Founder and Client Advocate at MEET interviews Laura Hannan, Co-Founder and Director of Client Success at Pitch121 on the Belly2Belly podcast. Listen on iTunes or Spotify Watch on YouTube Bill: Welcome to the belly to belly podcast where we explore in-person business to business market. This episode is brought to you by MEET, the company that helps international companies exhibit at US trade shows. Check them out at meetroi.com. Welcome, everybody. And this is belly to belly, our podcasts for MEET. And we’re a company that helps international companies exhibit at US trade shows. And the whole goal of this podcast is to really help you get the most out of your marketing and leverage, really all the resources you have. And we’re so delighted today to have Laura Hannan with us from pitch one to one. Laura, welcome. Thank you very nice to be here to see Bill. Oh, it’s wonderful to see you. So when we got started talking. It sounds like you had a bit of a role change. And now you’re the director of client success, and you’re a co-founder of the company. So what is the director of client success? What’s your job? Laura: Ah, all right. Well, let’s you know, when you’re a business owner, you’re doing everything I do. I am lucky to have a co-founder, Fergus Parker, so I lead on well, it says on the tin, it’s the director of client success. So I do have an account manager who is managing sort of day to day tasks with clients and I get to have the wonderful job of overseeing the strategy and just making sure that they get ROI. You know, it’s, it’s as simple as that. So all that we’re aiming for is for our clients to be happy and delighted and never cancel. Yeah, so obviously, the job gets bigger and bigger over time because we’re now in the beginning of our third year of business. And you know what the great thing about having this overview across lots of clients is that ideas come from everywhere. So you can really sort of them the platform changes, LinkedIn changes the way that people are using and consuming content changes, and I get to do the innovative stuff, you know, seeing what other people are doing, testing things, seeing what’s working and moving our product on. Bill: So cool. It sounds like you think a lot like we think and that is, you know when we think about serving our clients, it for us, it’s, it’s really what our job is to assure that our relationship matures and it’s successful enough for the client to where they’re a wonderful advocate for our services. And so that you know, with that as our sort of true north, it becomes very easy to make decisions. about what your service should be. It’s very, obviously very aligned with the right outcomes for your client, which Laura: I bet your network is full of future advocates and current advocates, Bill: Hopefully, and we’ll get into that, for sure. And certainly talking about your methodologies. But before we do, and just so everybody knows, so, you know, the real goal of this podcast is to help give you very useful information. And obviously, to do that we want to have context in terms of the information we’re sharing. So you all you and Fergus formed pitch one to one how many years ago Laura: And just over two years ago, cool. Bill: Excellent. And so what was the original impetus? What was it that caused you to do it? Laura: Okay, so I’ve been in sales for years and years as a sales practitioner and Ferguson I used to work on the same sales team. I’m looking at the date now. Let’s find out how many years was 14 years ago? And Bill: You were just a teenager then? Laura: Yeah, yeah, I was just, you know, thing. And what have we we’re in a content marketing agency. And I think that what you see in pitch One to One is the mix of burgers and I salespeople. But, but selling inbound marketing products, you know, we were selling content before content marketing was a phrase and you will see those influences coming in to pitch one to one. I think the thing that we discovered when we were working there, Fergus, by the way, ended up you know, working there for over a decade and becoming CEO of the company. The thing that was really overwhelming to us nothing because I went and worked for digital agencies and after that is then a tech startup after that is the time I worked at this content marketing agency was when I was the most effective at selling in terms of every quarter hitting my results. Why? Because we had telemarketers that would set up the meetings, then I’m not concentrating on lead gen, as well as closing as well as delivering a client and there is this. There’s a book called Predictable Revenue, which I’m sure some of your listeners will know. And it’s, you know, it’s absolutely convincing that you shouldn’t have your expensive salespeople, the salespeople are expensive, doing 360 sales. Obviously, telemarketing used to be effective and became less and less effective and you know, the, you need to adapt to how you’re doing lead gen. And but actually, the principle remains the same. That if you have your salespeople focused on just that part of the funnel, you’re going to help them to avoid that roller coaster of a great, great quarter. You’re so focused on closing that you haven’t done any legal so the next quarter is awful. And so that’s basically what pitch One to One is, is based on is, you know, working with in house teams to make sure they’ve got a predictable funnel, you know, got new opportunities coming in. Bill: And so your