The marketing movement by Refine Labs. Welcome to another episode of the marketing movement. I am Sylvia Valencia. I am a director of the man, Jen here at Refine Labs.
And today with me, I have Christy Sadler. She is the CRO at Synapse. And we're going to talk today about marketing and sales alignment, career pathing for marketing to sales, and a few other things. But Christy, welcome.
And would you mind introducing yourself in telling us a bit about your story? For sure. Thanks for having me, Sylvia. I really appreciate it.
So as Sylvia said, Christy Sadler. I'm the chief revenue officer at a company called Synapse, we're a learning operations platform. And so I typically, for most of my career, was more on the marketing side. But I've taken over as a chief revenue officer for the last couple of years at Synapse.
I would say that probably my path over to the sales side isn't typical. But I have had revenue, I'd say revenue teams because I've had business development reporting into me for probably aside from one company, one tech company that I worked for in the last 10 years, I've always had business development reporting into me. And I think it's super important for alignment across the revenue function to have business development reporting into marketing and into whatever revenue leader in general, obviously ends up leading the team. I think it probably could work either way.
But it's just been my experience that it's really helped make sure that there is a nice smooth handoff and that things are optimized on both sides of the funnel. Yeah, for sure. Awesome. Yeah, I totally agree.
I think it's really great that you had this team reporting into you for the last several years because I think it's something that not all companies have embraced just yet. Sales traditionally has that sales development, even business development. If they're doing outbound or something, and then account executives. But yeah, for sure, I think we're seeing that movement now of marketing leaders in general, starting to oversee at least the first part of the buying process so that it's closely aligned with what's going on in marketing.
And like you said, I think that's something that can teach you a lot on both teams and enable just cross learnings pretty fast. So that's awesome that you saw that. And what made you want to become actually revenue officer? Well, I have to say, I don't know that there was one thing that made me want to also lead to the sales part of the organization.
I think maybe 10 years ago, I remember asking a CRO that I'd worked with, really what it takes to go down that path. And this person said at that time, it's like, oh, Kristi, that's going to take you years. You're going to have to go back. And then I think that's going to be in a sales role for five years.
And it sort of quashed my, I think, drive to go and do it. Even though I'd always wanted to go back and actually take on a sales roles and have actually contemplated that from time to time. And then funny enough, when I joined Synapse, Synapse was the smallest company that I had worked for. So I started at the ground, I probably won one of the first five employees, I'd say.
And I had the opportunity to jump into a sales role. We lost our VP of sales. And we had generally we're generating too much demand to sell our tequip up with, which was our CEO at the time. So I jumped in and started selling, right?
I knew how to demo the product. I was very familiar with it. And you're a small team when it's a very small startup. Everybody does whatever you need to do to keep moving the business.
So I jumped in and sold for three months. And that wasn't the only reason that I ended up taking over the entire revenue function either. It was also that I was running the metrics. So in small teams, somebody has to be running the metrics.
And that has always been a strength of mine is really looking at all of those conversion rates and funnel metrics and diving through the operational data. I had sales for us, et cetera. And it was a natural progression. So as soon as the CEO was getting a little overwhelmed with all of the other work that he had on his play, he said, Chris, you should make sense for you to take over the revenue organization.
And I was really lucky with the people that I had on the team as well, where we're quite strong. So I made the transition very smooth into the role. So it was great. Yeah, that's a great story for sure.
And I'm assuming if you take over an early revenue organization, you can perhaps apply some of the learnings that you had before, like having two different organies or departments over see marketing and sales. Because even if before, the sales development team was reporting into you, there was still the later part of that process that was still reporting into another department. So I'm assuming that you took, it must be a really nice, clean slate to start from and to build a truly, I think, aligned team that is going for the same goal together, not as different teams. Yeah, absolutely.
And I think right now, not even I think, I know right now more than any time that I've seen in my past 20 years in leading revenue functions, it's complicated. And the buyer is not going through any sort of a straight path. And they don't want to talk to people. They don't want to talk to sales reps until they absolutely have to.
So there is, it needs to be so much of a buyer-focused journey. So if you're in marketing, if you're in business development, if you're in sales, your job is to be helping move that person towards solving whatever problem it is that they're trying to solve and helping them understand how your solution may or may not do it. So disqualify them as quickly as you might be able to qualify them. But that's why it makes some of the attribution model to be very, very dated now, right?
Because sales is always helping marketing. Marketing is always helping sales, right? Like everybody is really just doing everything that they can to help make sure that if that is the right buyer, if it's the right solution that we have for that particular customer, that we're helping them. And helping them understand, helping them get internal buy-in, whatever the case may be, and just bringing them along that journey together, we're a team.
Yeah, for sure. All the customer success as well, right? Yeah. Yeah.
It's a key part. I think you touched upon attribution. And I think we can carry out that bit of that conversation because it's a hot topic in general. Are these marketing leads, or are these sales leads, or is this deal outbound or inbound?
And of course, I think a lot of that stems from strategy and compensation of teams and how they're structured just from the beginning. If you are a salesperson and you're compensated more, if you bring in a certain kind of source deals, then of course, we're going to have those arguments and those discussions. But I think something that has been really insightful for me at least is I've spent so much time in the past looking at leads and looking at opportunities and going through every activity to make sure, is this marketing or is this sales? But what I think we're missing in that process, that some companies are now moving to, is that the source of the lead, the simplifying, there's steps to simplify it that would make it easier on everybody and waste less time.
But what's important here that we miss is, hey, what kind of mix of activities and interactions is working to move these buyers along the process, even if it was some inbound and some outbound. Like, what can we do more of that worked this time? What level of, you said it before, a buyer doesn't want to talk to you until they truly have to. So what does it take for us to have those conversations when the timing is right, but also educate them before?
And I think getting stuck on whose deal is this, makes us overlook the most important part of what we're here for, which is understanding that journey. Yeah, and it just feels like the wrong thing to be focusing on, right? And sales and marketing should be more of a, more of a dance, than it is a fight, right? So it shouldn't be, was it me or was it you?
It should be, who cares? Yeah, absolutely. In the first place, because both were involved. There's no way that sales is closing a deal, and marketing hasn't helped them do that if there is a website.
Yeah, and there's a brand. Right? Same thing on the sales side, right? Like it's on the marketing side.
It's like most of the time stuff comes in, and yeah, it might have been an initial interaction with maybe somebody at an event, or maybe it was a paid ad or whatnot. But if sales and marketing is truly working effectively together, some of that messaging in the ad maybe came from some conversations that marketing teams listened to from their sales colleagues, maybe sales helped to build some of the collateral that's being used within the funnel. I mean, ideally how it works, right? So sales is helping marketing has helped me sales, and together they're bringing the buyer through the journey.
Yeah, for sure. I really like how you summarize it at the beginning. It's not a fight. It's a dance.
And we need to be, I think, in sync enough to make sure that we're focusing on the right things and not wasting. It's so much time because it is a lot of time. Like when you start digging into attribution, I call it like a bit of a black hole, because once you get in, you can't get out. You know, it's really difficult.
So I think, like going back to your experience, it's really awesome that you had this opportunity to set it up from the ground up and say, hey, marketing and sales, we are the same team and we have the same goal. So is the goal in your case for marketing and sales? Is that revenue or how do you measure success today? Yeah, so overall success is definitely revenue.
And I would say like one of the ways that we in particular work towards making sure the team is 100% aligned is that like our weekly revenue meeting or sales meeting is a team meeting. It's a revenue meeting, right? And everybody knows where challenges are, where people are succeeding, and information gets passed on and talked about so that everybody progresses. On the sales side, obviously, you know, it's sales revenue is what sales people need to bring in.
On the marketing side, the real metric on the marketing side is pipeline generation, qualified pipeline generation. And we know that marketing is helping post-pipeline, and sales is helping pre-pipeline as well, right? So because we're having those interactions where both groups are helping one another. Absolutely.
And I think having that alignment and having that involvement of marketing throughout the process, I think brings a lot of visibility into some of the issues that like you said, we could help with, like when someone is price sensitive, that is something that can be addressed before they engage with sales. If it does end up being reflected on the later stages of the funnel, like, hey, we lost that due to budget or something. What could have been done from a marketing perspective, product messaging perspective before to influence that behavior or that, maybe that's not the right buyer for you. So how to work through that in the first steps of the journey.
I think that ownership of the process, I think, is something that if you as a marketer know that you can, because you can, influence someone so much early on, that they understand the product, understand your value prop, are purchase ready, and they engage with sales. That person can go through the process so much faster and better, and become an advocate than someone that hasn't gone through that. So I love the fact that you have both of your teams involved in those conversations so that the learnings are for everybody and not just sales. That's a sales thing.
Yeah, for sure. And there are so many things and so many ways that if you don't have that level of communication that just operate those opportunities that you mentioned, they just get nished. We know, as an early stage startup, one of the things that you're always struggling with is who's the ideal customer profile? What do they need to be able to sell across and sell up in those types of things?
And it's tough when you're small and you've got multiple people doing multiple things. So in any way that marketing can provide additional resources or help to sales and sales can provide additional or get resources started or something and give that to marketing the better. And the one thing that I always think of as well, and I'm sure you've seen this as well through your career, but there's always this sentiment where when you're trying to figure out what the problems were and somebody will come up with this great idea and say, it will be great if marketing could do this or it would be great if sales could do that. And one of the things that we try and do when we're going through, any sort of a brainstorming exercise is if you're going to come up with ideas, the ideas have to be something that you can implement.
They're not something that somebody else can implement. That's something that helps people, it gets sort of that blame sort of that, you know, if marketing had just done this or sales had to be pulled up with that lead, right? So it's like, what can I do? Oh, do you know what?
I can help sales see the leads that they might be missing. I might be able to help marketing create this asset. Let me flesh it out and then just ask for help at that stage. And then also assessing, like, you know, if you take on any of these initiatives that are going to help your buyer through the journey, is it just one buyer?
Is this being suggested because of this one deal and it was just this one time that it happened? Or is this the thing that will have impact on every single deal moving forward? So it's an initiative that should be prioritized and actually worked on by multiple people. Yeah, for sure.
I love that idea. I think that that getting rid of the fact that we are different teams, but rather we are one team working together towards the same goal really aligns with that. I come up with an idea of how I can help you versus I come up with ideas of how you can help me. And I think that flips it around so much because it's funny how as marketers, we've always known that our success really is if sales is successful, we are successful and vice versa.
Marketing is successful. Sales can also be very successful. So it's still strange that there is so much of this like divide and conquer mindset when it really is not that at all. Yeah, I wonder if these two, and I don't know if I mentioned this enough, but it's like customer success plays such an important role of that in that as well, right?
And getting that like post sale feedback, feeding that back into marketing messaging, feeding that back into sales and making sure that it's like a complete cycle. I think even in previous companies that I've worked with where sales and alignment has been great and I've been super lucky at most of the organizations I've worked in along those lines. But I've never been as close with customer success as we are at Synapse. It's really ingrained that we're actually starting to do on some of the larger deals that we're talking to, we're including everybody up front, right?
So it's like more of the pod structure where customer success is really helping sales as well during those initial calls because they're the ones that have the customer stories that they can pull off the top of their head because it's what they live in, they're living every day, right? So it just is, it can be really powerful as well in making sure that there is a unified effort to make sure that we're trying to help those buyers. For sure. Yeah, that's awesome.
And I think that's something that you're right. I don't think it's nearly as integrated as others. I think as marketers we're always kind of missing that end of the funnel, end of the process, we hand off the lead and that's it, like onto the next one, onto the next month of metrics. But this story really just that we can then use and make the most of is just beginning with a customer.
I'm curious, is there a specific way that you currently get that feedback from customer success about what's working, what's not working, and what sales and marketing can implement? Yeah, well we've got a number of different just automatic triggers that are in place, right? And like I said, our weekly meeting is all revenue teams together, right? So everybody in the revenue organization knows if there's a customer that might churn or if there's a customer who is a champion, we've got a really good sense of who those customers are.
But we also put just some processes in place so we can capture some of that information as well in a more programmatic way. Like when we do do, when we run our NPS surveys, which we do quarterly, there's always, you know, for people who are promoters and who are getting a lot of value from the platform, we ask them if they would be willing to get a review or if we could potentially work with them on a case study. And it's been quite successful. The other thing that we did that was led by a combination of our marketing team and the it was our content marketing manager and our head of customer success was just running many surveys that allowed us to sort of bypass that big heavy lift, which is a case study.
So we just asked several questions that would give us the case study answers and then as part of that, ask if we could use their comments publicly and from that are able to put together just these mini little snippets. It also gives us some aggregate data about the benefits that the customer is having using Synapse that we can turn into numbers when we're talking to prospects and say, you know, essentially 70% of Synapse customers are saving 20 or more hours per month by using the platform. Right? So it just gives us some of that aggregate data by being able to run some of those programs.
That's awesome. And that actually reminds me at one of my previous jobs, it was also a very small company. And we had the issue that all of our customers were very enterprise. And what happens when you have a giant customer like Coca-Cola or something, good luck getting approval for that case study, logo use, you know, like it's so challenging, especially as a small vendor part of a large, you know, stack of partners that they probably have.
It's so many layers. And what we ended up trying to do and we got a couple of these through, which was very exciting, was having me or someone else in marketing have a small conversation or hear or get some insights about what the customer was getting out of our platform, having a small short conversation with them, asking them some very specific questions, meaning we go into the conversation with some context of what's going on and a little bit more, you know, less introduction needed, although that was still very valuable. And we ended up calling these case studies success stories. It was just the naming thing.
When you tell them it's a case study or it's a testimonial, they're like, oh no. But we said it's just a success story. It's one page, nothing else. We put it together and then we sent it for approval and just having that interlock with the customer success manager that was on that account, getting the context from them, building that close relationship with them and then speaking, marketing speaking directly to customers, I think that is super valuable because the amount of insights that I got from those conversations, even though some questions were scripted is still is one of my favorite things to do.
You get so many campaign ideas and the words that your customers use to describe you and what you help them with, there's a lot of value there. Yeah, it's amazing. I know this is total opposite end of the spectrum. I remember several years ago, one of the organizations that I worked with myself in the head of product around a voice of the customer program and we went into the offices.
So head of marketing, head of product went into multiple days into the office of several customers and we would talk to everybody who touched the platform. So not just our primary users, other people who looked at the reports or who heard of the platform and I have to say that helped me even fall in love with the company that I was working for even more. Because as a marketer, you're sometimes a little bit removed from it and the more you can get those front line stories and hear the impact the platform is having on these customers, the better it just makes you such a better marketer. Absolutely.
Yeah, and it kind of gives you purpose, right? It's not just a tool that we're selling a software that we're selling. We are improving someone's life in a certain way. In that sense, really cheesy, but when you hear it from your customer, it makes it all a little bit more meaningful.
But absolutely, I love that idea of having that product and marketing interlock and really finding out more. Love that we got into the full revenue perspective, not just marketing and sales. I wanted to know, have there been anything in particular that you've implemented, not just at your current role, but even before, specific tactics that you found helpful when it comes to finding that marketing and sales alignment, having those goal conversations or when sales doesn't understand what marketing is up to and they want to know more or vice versa, has there been anything in particular that has been successful for you? Yeah, and this might sound a bit funny because I think that nobody wants more meetings, but there has to be FaceTime, especially in a remote environment between sales and marketing.
If the sales and marketing team don't have time together, then there can't be alignment. There's going to be a misunderstanding of what they can do to work together most effectively. Even if it doesn't have to be weekly, it doesn't have to be biweekly. I've seen successful monthly meetings.
If it's something that the two teams aren't used to doing together, sales wants to understand what are the programs that marketing is running that's going to help them with their pipeline or with whatever they're doing. Those are really great connection points to be able to say. This is what we've got planned for the next quarter. This is what we've got planned for the next month.
These are the updates that you can expect from us that should help you be able to piggyback your activities off of the back of those campaigns and give sales the opportunity to say, you know what, I loved all of the leads that you sent in last month from LinkedIn or whatnot, like gives them the opportunity as well to highlight things that they're finding successful. One of the other things too is in terms of making sure that that information is being properly passed back and forth. I think now that there's so many different ways to communicate, it's not necessarily a meeting, but some of the programs that marketing runs can be really helped by feedback from the sales organization. Think of things like even Google Ads or keyword trends and stuff like that.
It might be coming up in calls and maybe marketing isn't having the opportunity to listen to as many calls as they might want to or isn't having the opportunity to talk to customers in the same way as sales does and sales provide that feedback. As long as there's an openness and a really good relationship between the two functions, they can collaborate on those types of things. It's when you don't have that sort of trust and feelings of respect for one another, that collaboration is difficult. Yeah, for sure.
I think those are really good pointers. I think having that baseline of trust makes for good alignments, but getting there, I think is challenging for a lot of teams and a lot of organizations. I was going to mention, I think something that is very important that has worked before for me is really driving home why we're doing certain things for. We are here to provide you with pipeline, not a high volume of daily leads and reinstating that message because obviously, as salespeople, you want to see a lot of volume come in, but we also know that volume does not mean quality and that the leads and the prospects that are high intent, high purchase intent that come through, that end up becoming customers are obviously the more time consuming prospects to generate from a marketing perspective.
I think always kind of reemphasizing that goal of like, because up until very recently, I've had questions like, hey, but leads are down. Today, what's happening with leads today? You got to like re-center the conversation on what we're here for is pipeline. Last month, we provided less leads and more pipeline, which means the quality of prospects increased.
That's what we're here to do. I think that's also something that is often overlooked because it feels like everybody knows, but especially in the volume conversations, I think that helps. It's interesting too, because there's sometimes where there's a disconnect is a lack of understanding of the importance of all sorts of different dimensions of leads and demand that's being generated. Yes, maybe we did bring in 2000 leads or contacts or some interested parties, the downloaders of content, a combination of the downloaders of content and high intent leads.
You say like, all we want is the high intent leads or that one is better than another, one is going to turn into revenue faster than another. But especially if you are an earlier stage startup or a startup who is trying to create a category, you need a lot of brand recognition. You need a lot of people understanding who you are and what you do. And sometimes the best way to do that is through content marketing.
And when people are downloading those assets, they might not have high intent and they might not purchase for three years, but it's still important that they get to know us. They get to understand the brand that there's a level of familiarity and that there's different levels of people in the organization that are familiar with who you are. So it's super hard for say a startup with a new product to go to market and you've got to really engage buyer and really understand the value of what the salesperson is presenting and there's lots of great material. And then they go to their internal departments to say, you know what, this is going to have such a huge impact for us and nobody else has heard.
Nobody else has heard of this company. Nobody else has any idea what they do or why we should spend 15, 20, $30,000 on a solution to a problem that we're barely aware of. So it's doing some of that marketing that might seem like this isn't the exact person that I want to talk to. No, but this might be the person that's influencing your deal.
Next year, two years from now, it's interesting. I was in a conversation the other day and we were talking about buying committees. And there was one person who said that they had a buying committee with 130 people on it. They could only identify like 10 or 15 of them, but they knew there were 130 people that essentially were getting signed off on that deal.
So when you're talking about sort of the dimensions of leads or all of these, this volume coming in, you have to have an understanding of what that volume is about. And of course, you don't want companies that could never buy from you or whatnot. But there is a lot of value in brand exposure in addition to getting those sort of high intent hand raisers in the door, right? Of course, yeah.
That purchase readiness does not come through direct response channels like Google alone, right? They're always running ads for best X software. Don't expect that that volume that you're getting from Google is going to magically increase month over month because that really is not all it takes to create. Like that is capturing people that are ready to purchase, but not those that are not.
And that is the biggest chunk of the pie, which is very exciting. But also, when I look back at my career, I think so many of my roles have been so focused on those leads, volume leads, leads, leads. And we have run a lot of direct response, fill out the form, assess as you can. And really overlooked that 99% of the people that could buy from us are just not there yet.
And how do we stay top of mind and add value throughout that process so that, again, when they do come in, they're more qualified. That sales process is easier, smoother. I think it's such a simple logical concept, but it's hard to attach to certain metrics. And I think what you said really resonates with the fact that not every marketing activity is a revenue generating activity.
Marketing's goal is revenue, but that doesn't mean that all of your activities need to directly bring revenue, meaning your marketing attribution software is going to tell you that your community or that your podcast or that your organic feeds have no revenue value. But at the end of the day, you know that that is a significant part of what's building that interest for your product. So I think you said it really well there. So I'm very hopeful that now that more companies are starting to understand, hey, buyers are buying differently.
They don't just want a demo form. First time they see your brand is like, get a demo. That's not what, when was the last time, that worked on you, right? So it's a very interesting progress here.
Yeah, for sure. Awesome. And now I wanted to ask you some career or skill-driven questions because I think a lot of us in marketing, for example, my first ever role was in sales. I did not know that it was a sales job until I was at the job the first day.
And I was like, what? I have to sell. I don't know how I got through the interview process. That job taught me how difficult it is to generate and convert the demand on the spot because I was cold calling.
It was very outbound. And now, you know, like eventually I moved into marketing and I started doing marketing. But now for today's, you know, current marketers that are in either demand or product marketing or whatever content marketing that are looking at that CRO or that revenue organization and as a potential career path, what are some of the skills or activities that someone can do today in any marketing role that you think would contribute to that path? Yeah, and I think if it's CRO or even CMO, if you're a more junior marketer and looking to move up, the best thing you can do is really dig into data, understand data, understand the metrics and know it for the full funnel, right?
So understand, you know, if you're a marketer, know what happens in a sales cycle after the lead, you can't stand it over. And after that opportunity is created, just get curious, have a really good understanding of where the metrics sit after that and get a full picture of how those two teams work together and how they can help one another. I would say like the more marketers are encouraged and enable themselves and teach themselves to be sales focused the better and it goes both ways, sales people on the other side as well because people don't really want to talk to them anymore, the more that they can be very clear and compelling in their message and honest and have empathy with the buyer the better, right? So I think, you know, both teams can really learn well from one another.
But in order to get into a role where you are running a full funnel, you have to have a really good understanding of the metrics, the unit economics and all of the underlying data that sits underneath because that's how you can figure out which levers to pull, right? And if you're in SAS in particular, the appetite is always going to be to how do we create a scalable, repeatable, scalable process, right? You could only do that if you're super familiar with the data, right? Yeah.
Oh, we put more money in here. Oh, XYZ is going to increase or decrease by a fly Z percent. You'll look and evaluate is what happening, you know, what you think thought happened is it happening? If it's not, what do you need to change?
How much time does it take? Have you looked at the cohort? How much time does it take for these particular people to do what we expect them to do? And you know, how can we go about really making sure that there is structure and process?
That's also to say you have to have creativity and all of that sort of stuff around the outside, but data is so telling, right? So understanding data and having like a really strong curiosity around trying to play with that data and see if you can find any sort of gaps and not only use and those sort of things. I mean, that's half of the fun of the job as well. Yeah, absolutely.
You can't be a sales driven marketer and be afraid of the numbers or committing to revenue goals and having that as a friend and not again, something that you're fighting against. Yeah, I think that's super, super valuable. I was going to say that it's important for marketers to also, like you said, have a good understanding of the sales process. I am still very surprised that marketing people don't know what this opportunity stages mean and what that means for sales, right?
So we see an opportunity and we're like, oh my God, that's an opportunity. But really, is that entering pipeline forecasting conversations or is it not? And having that level of awareness of at least that until that customer comes through that process, understanding it really well, I think enables, can enable a lot of people to start going down that path of that's what they want to do. Yeah, for sure.
And that even comes to just like empathy, right? Empathy for the other role, both sides, right? So sales, sales, having empathy for marketing, marketing, having empathy for sales and both understanding sort of what the process is on either side. Yeah, for sure.
Absolutely. Well, I am very glad that we got to chat through all of this. I know that the marketing and sales dance is a dance that is going to go on for a long time and we still have to figure out what kind of dance we're dancing, I think, because everybody's kind of doing their own thing. But thank you so much for chatting with me today.
And thank you to everybody that listens, stay tuned for our next episode. Thanks so much. So yeah, happy to be here.