MarTech Interview with William Tyree, CMO at ringDNA

Please tell us about your role and the team/technology at ringDNA.

I am the Chief Marketing Officer at ringDNA. We offer a Sales platform that radically improves productivity and performance for Sales, Customer Success and Support teams, which translates to more conversations and more revenue.

Most importantly, we are remote by design, which makes it possible for us to enable Sales teams around the world as they continue to sell during the COVID crisis.

As a CMO of a Sales Engagement technology platform, tell us about your vision and how you work toward achieving it.

Our mission at ringDNA is to create top Sales performers, improve Sales experiences and help exceed buyer expectations to drive more revenue. As CMO, my primary job is to enable our revenue teams so that we can help more customers improve productivity and performance.

Working with our Sales team to create Account-Based Marketing and Sales initiatives, as well as lead generation, are always at the top of that list. Simultaneously, creating remarkable content that educates our customers and prospects by helping them strategically and tactically is paramount.

We already know about Automation and Data Visualization applications transforming the Marketing, Sales and Support functions. What makes ringDNA different in this competitive landscape?

For enterprise customers, our global capabilities and compliance are a big strength. Our customers expect their solutions to not only work flawlessly from anywhere on earth, but also be GDPR and SOC II compliant. Our remote Sales coaching capabilities are also a big differentiator – ringDNA curates a team’s most important conversations and coaching opportunities, enabling managers to focus on the reps and specific moments that need management attention most.

Lastly, ringDNA doesn’t force customers to choose between a strong outbound Sales Engagement tool and one that helps Sales teams convert more inbound leads. We lead prioritization, inbound call tracking, AI-powered Conversation Intelligence, remote Sales Coaching and much more in one complete platform.

Your technology fills the gaps between Sales planning and Revenue generation. What kind of infrastructure does one need to leverage your technology?

Teams simply need a laptop, an Internet login and a Salesforce account. The entire ringDNA platform was built natively for Salesforce, so all reporting, insights, lead prioritization and more takes place either in Salesforce or in a Chrome or Edge browser.

Which industries and regions have been the most active to benefit from your tech and support? Any particular industry, you would like to see a great adoption? 

Two years ago, the answer to that question would have been growth-stage and enterprise tech companies. Now we are seeing adoption from a wide variety of sectors ranging from real estate to financial services.

Since the COVID-era began, we are seeing particularly high adoption in Healthcare, as field reps increasingly do their work remotely.

Tell us more about your Intelligent Dialer for Salesforce and how it helps develop scalable Sales Acceleration campaigns.

The Dialer primarily helps with productivity and performance. Without ringDNA, 66%  of rep time is spent on manual, non-revenue generating activities such as logging calls and inputting activity data.

The Dialer solves that by automating all Sales activities, including calls, text messages and emails, call recordings and much more into Salesforce. That frees up Sales teams to spend far more time selling. In terms of performance, the dialer surfaces contextually relevant data from a variety of sources – associated Marketing campaigns, call scripts, past engagement history, current opportunities, and much more. That helps reps have smarter conversations and close more deals.

Adding other features, like local area dialing and automated voicemails, and we have seen customers 4X their conversations and revenue after using the dialer for just a few months.

Hear it from the Pro: how to adopt the right recruitment strategy when hiring remotely? What is the perfect Remote Onboarding strategy?

My advice is simple: don’t change what works just because you’re remote. In fact, double-down on what works. For example, we have onboarded several employees in Marketing during the COVID-19 era, and we use the same role-specific onboarding document containing product education milestones, company cultural education milestones and project deliverables they need to achieve.

We are very cross-departmental in terms of collaboration, so the primary difference right now is that new employees need to invite people they don’t know to Zoom meetings instead of in-person meetings.

Tell us about the tools and technologies you use for Marketing, Sales, Hiring and Communications?

Our technology stack is extensive. I’d rather not disclose brand names, because doing so will only invoke a swarm of competitor sales rep inquiries and LinkedIn connection requests.

With that said, we rely on solutions for Marketing Automation, Website health monitoring, Direct mail, Account-based Lead identification, AI-chatbots, Webinar creation, Project management, Video hosting, Candidate scoring, and much more.

In the current scenario of COVID-19 making an unprecedented dent on every business and exposing IT gaps, how does ringDNA stay prepared and enable customers?

Fortunately, our own software is remote by design, making it easy for the entire team to work from anywhere on Earth. Beyond that, we have pivoted our content strategy to be especially helpful to address needs that are particularly timely.

For example, some sales managers have never managed a remote team, so we publish reports and actual original data showing what the trends are and what is working. We put a significant amount of educational resources on our blog and via our Sales Enablement Podcast with Andy Paul to give expertise to our customers in areas they may need it most.

Tell us about the changing expectations from DevOps and AI engineering teams, especially with increased pressure to deliver real-time results and meet security standards.

GDPR and SOC II compliance are obviously important. Beyond that, we go the extra mile to offer customers localized options such as automated call recording/non-recording depending on the geolocation of those on any given conversation. We are constantly listening to our customers’ desires regarding security and integrating those wishes into our roadmap.

Tag a person whose answers you would like to read here:

Mathew Sweezey, Director of Market Strategy at Salesforce.

Thank you, William! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.