Welcome everyone to a stacking growth. It's Friday afternoon and this is Cassidy along with Carl. Carl. How you doing?
Hey? Hey doing good. Let's get into it. Yeah, I feel like we missed a few Fridays, so um Just feels comfortable.
We're back in the time slot. I'm home. I feel I feel like cozy like I'm at home We almost went LinkedIn live, but you didn't want to do it. You check it out.
I check it out You know, I just I don't know if the bar of my own content has been high enough for me to go and Share with my loyal massive LinkedIn following so I got a little nervous, you know, sorry. So next Friday what would it be November? 11th, 8th 9th. Yeah, 11th.
11th Carl is gonna bring a topic and we're going LinkedIn live. Go on LinkedIn live You committed to it for me just now. We're doing exactly that's what happens. That's what you boss can do All right, so what I'm gonna talk about and get your thought on it is a post I had the other day Which was the five-way sales leaders can you know show some leadership in helping out their fellow marketers within their organization?
The reason I wrote this is that you know the passive and pretty critical that when I think about sales and marketing alignment It's a it's an issue for marketers like they need to go fix that but the same kind of things that sales Leaders can do to help that relationship and this seems to be a topic that keeps coming up marketers like to blame sales people Sales people like to say marketing is kind of irrelevant. And so I thought we do this talk through the five things and then I don't get your thoughts on this. Yeah, from there. We can talk about you know, whatever else is going on the world this week So let me riff off these five and we can dig into each one.
Number one is concept equality over quantity Number two is encourage building awareness Number three is invite marketing into the sales process Number four is allowing outbound sales with inbound marketing And number five is lead by example and don't let sales off the hook Now you're probably wondering what what the hell do these five things mean? Um, so why don't we start with one? I'll kind of give my thoughts on it and then I'll give you your take Yeah, so number one quality of equality. I hope this Makes sense, but this is really focusing on this notion of the leads that the sales team get from marketing Suck this is kind of a classic debate Yet sales often wants a large quantity of leads for marketing And we know very well that large quantity of leads usually equals bad leads And so what a sales my point here is what the sales team can do is take a leadership position here By letting marketing know that it's not about quantity.
It's about quality. We want leads that will actually convert to pipeline that close Versus we need thousands of leads that we can shut into Uh our sdr team you can do a bunch of work because we've hired these people Uh, yet we know that the work they do is going to have a low yield and no return on investment Seems logical to me carl. What do you think it seems absolutely logical, but here's a thing Cassidy I thought of this while you were um while you were talking about that So i'm gonna nervously bash now. I'm not gonna bash what am I gonna do here?
I'm gonna challenge the sales fan because I think you just actually raised the bar a little bit higher than sales people are used to You said something really critical you said the sales team needs to recognize that we don't Need more leads. We need higher quality and like the marketing team needs to know that or be told that right but Sales brings an old school mindset with their outbound. They believe that more is the answer right? They believe that sales is a numbers game.
They believe in volume So I think actually you're challenging salespeople here sales leaders as much as you're challenged marketing because sales leaders don't think like that They don't think quality over quantity historically They think oh well if the leads are garbage We better just yell at marketing to give us more leads because this is a numbers game That's exactly what they do to their sdr teams. Oh, we're not getting any meetings or all of these none of these meetings convert So what's the answer? We'll get more meetings higher more sdr's. So I don't know I just I thought that that was interesting that I don't think sales the sales world is actually mature enough or Evolved enough to actually even be able to give that good critical feedback to marketing and say hey stop what you're doing actually want less Stop producing leads we want opportunities.
How can we work together to increase opportunities? Which you may or may not have anything to do at all with more leads and obviously logically your leads are gonna go down dramatically So I think that that's a challenging mindset shift You know not that you know believe it a point that's a challenging mindset shift not just for marketing for sales and here's the thing one more thing i'll say i'll get your thoughts on this if Sales typically has like more political clout I think in an organization and so I think a lot of times marketing actually man My sales fam is gonna kill me for this one but um marketing is actually doing what sales is wanting them to do because sales can go into tell marketing what to do because they have the Political clout so I wonder if marketers are stuck just being servers and order takers for sales and sales is asking for the wrong thing and then marketing is playing for it So I don't know it's a hunch of that. All right. Let me start with the one the point you made at the end the sales team has more clout Absolutely agree Particularly I would say in early stage companies the CEO has to make a decision like who am I gonna?
Where am I gonna invest my money in talent and it's usually bringing in a senior sales leader ahead of a Experience marketing leader And I think you can kind of see this throughout like the company's maturity and maybe at some point these rules are on the same You know level of experience and priority but it feels like early on no So part of what I'm outlining this is it's a responsibility as the more senior revenue leader in a company To be able to take a leadership position not only in running the sales team but also in the relationship with the marketing team So I absolutely agree with you. I think sales by and large and B2B companies have more clout Um, then the marketing organization The other point you made I think is really interesting and I just can a sales leader on one hand be pushing his It's called outbound sales organization They go high volume low yield and on the other hand turn around at the marketing organization and say I don't want high volume low yield I want you know high quality and high yield and I hadn't actually thought of it that way But you're probably right that that's a very difficult mindset shift to make for kind of a sales leader So I guess my question back to you is I thought the predominant wisdom and best practice and kind of an outbound motion is to move away from high volume Into much deeper personal relationships more one-on-one Interaction where you know if that was your strategy on an outbound Kind of motion that that would align better with what we're saying that they need to do with the relationship with the marketing team Any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that if you were a sales leader and that's the culture or the mindset that you were requiring of your outbound team your sdr Your aes or your smes then I think naturally you'd say oh, this is working in this way Let's go share that and see how marketing can take the same mindset and maybe scale it a little bit more Right because marketing just the channels that they traditionally have access to can reach more people than the channels that Salespeople are typically have access to salespeople traditionally right only have access to very like networking types of channels One-to-one stuff phone email direct mail small micro events, etc But how can we take this high touch high quality low volume mindset and apply that to marketing? That's that would be an amazing thing to position I think to the marketing team But instead I think the marketing team is kind of peer pressured into falling into the same trap that sales falls into sales says Here's my outbound team.
We need more leads And then they don't get what they need from their sdr's and so they take that problem And that strategy that doesn't work and they say well, we just need more let's amplify them They force the marketing team to do the same thing But the whole reason they're going to the marketing team is and begging for more leads is because they're the way they do outbound As they're working to begin with So it actually is I mean man, it's just it's a painful of but again The reason that this can kind of continue and be prevalent in the business is because sales has the cloud and this now goes to the side of the argument Which will probably get you where marketers need to take accountability And they need to establish their own political leverage and they need to establish their own sense of dominance and cloud and leadership and say no And pump the brakes and really be able to dig into crm and say hey high volume look quality doesn't work To hit our goals the sales team proved that So why are you asking me the marketing team with who has a much larger budget Typically than a sales team at least for advertising etc And has a much bigger war chest of channels That we can we can go marketing can go do anything they can podcast and they have a bunch of different social media channels Google is a million things that they can do and you know, so anyways Why would you go and take a strategy that's not working on the sale side and then go try to apply it to something This doesn't make any sense. Hopefully I'm making some sense. Yeah, I think you are I think what we what we determined in this first point of quality over quantity is that Um, this isn't just a change that a sales leader needs to make in terms of the relationship with marketing It's really what they should be leading across the entire revenue organization in terms of philosophy That we should be looking at No matter how we got to go to market and what channels we use we should always be looking for quality over quantity So I'd say a complete fair and one more point and then we can move on But is that like marketing to give marketers listening to this some tools to go make a better argument internally for why they need to stop doing lead gen Is go look in crm outbounding sales is very direct response? Attribution is crystal clear people answer the phone and they end up in the pipeline or they don't this is all perfectly logged in crm So go use that as a data backed decision And now you bring that to me as the ceo or even the vp sales and say wait You want me to repeat these results with and actually don't have phone numbers I'm actually I'm actually at a disadvantage because I'm not at least sales can talk to people at least they will get like a conversation Which should increase the uh the effectiveness of a high volume channel at least I get to handle an objection marketing can't handle objections Right marketing doesn't talk to people they're they're they're running strategies in segments and audiences not in names and individuals, right?
so Logically marketing will be less successful than sales at a high volume strategy and sales isn't working So it's absurd to think that you should go and do that with marketing I don't know. I just marketing should use that is my point is that marketers this I think if I would you this would be my argument And I don't know how you get around this. I don't know how a ceo or a cfo or vp sales Would be able to squirrel around this logic that'd be fascinating conversation This is actually a brilliant and non-obvious insight car that you just brought up. I didn't actually thought of this I think this is your own fire day for a Friday afternoon That is okay an hour ago.
So you know that yeah, that is uh, listen high volume outbound's not working Look at these results and you want me to do this on an inbound model Which we know will be less efficient because we're not targeting individuals. Yes, this is an ass and I strategy You know by the way, if you're already doing Uh, me jet on your inbound model the same numbers are in the crm. They already show they're already show you it doesn't work So, um, the case can be made in a variety of ways that this is not a viable strategy Well done. I like that.
I do stuff sometimes you know you do stuff. All right, let's move on number two encourage building awareness So here's one thing's here's another kind of paradox and that is A one hand the sales team wants a lot of leads on the other hand They love it when the prospects they talk to are aware of the company So they always want like they love awareness. Let's go to events. Let's build our brand.
Let's do cool things Let's be innovative. Oh, but at the same time give me a ton of leads And so you know what a marketer here is this it's confusing You want me to go off and kind of build our brand and awareness of like who we are or you want to go get leads Um, and what I would maintain is like the best sales leaders I've worked with or more focused on Build awareness for what we do our category or brand or products whatever and like we'll take care of the rest It's not on that As a salesperson I would prefer if I had to pick one or the other and you're going to define what leads are right And I think in year in my world a lead is an email address That I already have because I have a subscription to rocket reach I can get an email address for 33 cents So I don't want leads actually. I think what it's a bit support communication from sales leaders I think honestly here because they're like we want more leads no you don't you have a database of six billion leads Okay, or aka email addresses Um, what I want are people that are interested in having a conversation Uh, what I want are people that have you know shown some interest or some familiarity with our brand, right? If you think about your entire total addressable market your tam There's like this ice cold layer of people have never heard from you But there's actually this huge body of your tam that has at least heard of you at least heard of you Like probably been it to your website Um, and it's almost like I want more of that Honestly, I want less cold like no sales teams should have to go to cold regions of the tam If marketing is allowed to do Awareness and brand type of work that kind of warms I know this is like very like it's like a lot of sales people like we don't want warm things We want to outbound to cold whatever that you're a liar I want to reach out to people who have been on the website recently who have followed our company page who have engaged with us in some way and um Marketing's job I think to really oversimplify is just to enroll as many people into their Ecosystem of content is possible and then that gives a huge pool of of of warmed-ish familiar people at least familiarized individuals That's a lead.
That's what I would want as a sales person not an email. I want Cassidy has been on our website once I'll take that all day Because I can take that and turn that into buying intent and I can start a conversation with Cassidy early and get his criteria and network With him do the work of like old school sales just get to know Cassidy and his business Um, and whenever it becomes time this is outbound in a create demand mindset When it comes time who's Cassidy gonna think about he might even think about my brand He might think about me Carl. I got Carl had some good ideas six months ago. I'm gonna call Carl That's what I want.
So let me get to straight. You do not appreciate When you're talking to somebody new a lead and you ask them have you ever heard of us and they say no You don't want that challenge. Yeah. Yeah, where you ask what do you know about us?
And they're like not much nothing really Cassidy, I'm a sales person. I count every minute matters So to be talking to you and asking you have you heard of us and you say no Immediately, you know when I think about opportunity cost I'm like man I'm about to waste my time telling Cassidy what we do when I could be on the phone with somebody who was already one step beyond that That already knows what we do and now I can be jumping into the deep end right there's opportunity cost for every single conversation that I have As a salesperson. So It's not my job to be telling people what we do especially if you're spending money on marketing It's like what is this? This isn't my job My job is to capture and close business and create demand with the best of our tan right dream customers Not to just be telling you know, joe bob and sue what they can find out on my home page of my website Let's test this out.
So you've had your last two sales leadership roles Obviously, I have a fine labs where all of our demand is really inbound So people know who we are and then you're at this tiny company that nobody's heard of called hubspot And then you've had other sales roles before that but those companies I don't remember but I do remember hubspot And of course for fine labs how easy or how much easier has your The sales role been in the last two companies versus maybe the first two or three or oh man I mean easier is I don't know if easier is the right word, but I would say like Transformationally different more fun. I actually do what I want to be doing Which is having conversations with smart people and solving problems. That's what a sales person does That's why you would pay somebody high six figure salary Is it to be a flyer that informs somebody of what you do or you pay in 200k 180k? Whatever it is for somebody to have really awesome, you know, intelligent conversations about problems and solutions So I would say to any sales people listening like it's transformational once your career To be at a company like that where you're not doing another department's job plus your own job of closing It's just not any fun to have to convince people and educate people right?
I think there's a place for that in sales you always run into that here or there But if it's like your core responsibility, you're not maximizing your career. You're not actually learning anything new I'm sorry. I love SDRs, but what are you learning by telling people over and over what you do and convincing them to take a meeting? Like the ceiling to that learning on that role is gonna be very low You're gonna do that for a couple of months and you're probably gonna learn nearly everything that you're gonna learn in that role, right?
It's not the case for being like a sales person with a good marketing team. You're closing. You're solving. It's totally different It's again transformational to your career Yeah, it's not just the sales leader.
I mean, there's not a CEO I don't I'm not talking with you. It doesn't want two things Obviously they want to grow their company But too is they want awareness of the problem they're solving of their brand their category They love awareness like And that drives a leader crazy when they're at a That vet or something and nobody you're the CEO of a company and the person you're talking to doesn't know who you are. That's awful Driving us. I was talking to see you today earlier today And he was like he was talking about actually this and you used to litified why this was important I didn't quite catch its importance when I was on the call because I'm out of CEO and that's I don't think like this But he was like man, I just want to google like certain things and my company Shows up and I think that's what you're speaking to he wasn't talking about like I want to make sure we're covering these keywords in our search advertising That's not what he was saying what he was saying what you just hit and connected the dots for me Was I want to be known my work to be known to solve these problems for these people because I'm passionate about this And I love this and I want to be the center of attention sounds weird But I want to be the center of this world I want to be who people know of and think of when they think of xyz solutions and problems That's uh, that's a really interesting knowledge insight that you just surfaced that I need to think more about Yeah, you're you're putting your heart into Running a company and chances are you might be the founder of that company and you know you can change the world and you want people to know it Because you believe it and when they don't know it, it's frustrating And you know what's interesting on the marketing side and maybe this is another thought that your perspective on is Marketers have always treated these this like revenue growth and brand awareness as like Um, you have to choose which you would want for some reason there's a belief that these two things don't actually go together But I would argue they're highly a correlated in aligned that if you're doing the things that you need to do To build awareness in the right way that that will lead to revenue growth But countless times you hear marketers like well, I really do brand awareness But my team is forcing you to do lead gen for growth like back your point being able to explain this these things aren't That's a weird paradox They should actually be highly correlated these two things but like most marketers don't think that way Yeah, that's a problem because marketers one should think that way and be able to like enforce that like lead that perspective in their companies This is where like the biggest the biggest downfall is you have markers.
They don't lead in their organizations They just take orders. They just allow themselves to be bullied by sales or whatever So that's one point the second point I think um to make here is that I think marketers are forced to do sales So they had they can't just think of awareness and brand and making a big splash and getting as many people to correlate their brand with xyz problem or category They are forced to do sales and so they can't just the same problem that sales has, you know sales is forced to do marketing SDRs are just marketers with the same tools. I've said this before on the record like sales people are hilarious because they've been so forced to do marketing that they literally Have taken hubspot and like marketing automation software and cloned it and then named it outreach and called it a sales acceleration platform I've ever been these platforms. It's the same shit Cassidy same exact thing same thing just different colors and branding Um, and so I think both departments just need to pump the brakes and be like why are we forcing marketers to get us email addresses that we already pay for and why are we making sdr's build awareness with the worst tools on the planet to do this They have to call people with a phone When marketers have budgets and audiences and segments and data and tools like linkedin and etc to be able to to put a message in front of people at scale for the Awareness that I don't know.
I'm not gonna say that that's the fundamental problem underneath at all because I think there's a lot of problems underneath at all But I feel like that answers kind of your question there that that is to these two departments that are not working together doing each other's jobs and trying to do their I Subserve. Yeah, I think we preach about this quite a bit But I actually believe it you should the marketing teams slow job on this should be to get people to raise their hands Even such a good job marketing that being wants to talk to a salesperson or try your product That's marketing everything else just put a different team Like if you want to get a lead or a phone number or email address and go out to them Like that should just be another organization give you the sales team something that sits in between Yeah, but like that should not be how you go with your marketing team either. So fng ancient Um, and it just creates the behavior It's just great. It's behavior that is gonna lead you not being successful though.
Yeah, I don't want to like throw out another lane metric But like I think hand raises is great. Um, it's I would say that that's like a lagging Yeah lagging kind of metric, right? It's like it's they've done that and they've raised their hand Man, I like you know we use some tools like lead magic or clear bit to see like anonymous traffic It's fascinating to see how many people interact with your website and don't convert to a salesperson I'm like this is enough for me. So not only do I want hand raisers.
Those are great But i'm not lazy I'd love to also i'll talk to the hand raisers if you get me an even larger pool of people who have like been on the website Have interacted with us are following our company page It's like I think those are also really important metrics for marketers that a good sales team would appreciate Because now in 2022 2023 we have visibility into all of that So somebody that's visited the website that is going to keep me from going to the coldest regions of my tan Like so really marketing's goals should be that sales can hit their pipeline numbers and never have to go To the coldest regions of the tan there should be many layers of warmth that they can traverse through Before they have to do something like that it should never happen I should have high intent hand raisers that keep me busy And then I should have people who are showing some kind of intent in our with at least our brand whether they're interacting with our advertising Or they're interacting with our company pages or newsletters or they're on the website That is a huge pool of people Cassidy And there's no real good mechanism out there because marketing isn't working with sales to surface that and be like your sales team here's all of this too I would be a victory. I think and right now it's like siloed. It's it's lost in tools that the sales team doesn't even have access to right So let me make sure i'm clear you would rather If you were to go off and go outbound and talk to a company or an individual you'd rather start with the companies who've shown up on the website Or follow your company page on LinkedIn versus some cold list that you just kind of made up on your own or somebody handed to you Shocking shocking. I know it's really shocking paradigm shifting.
I will we just change sales forever, but yeah To get to your question and not sarcastically. Yes, of course Again, I should never have to go it like something is marketing is broken if a sales team has to go to those cold regions, right? It's like there's no awareness happening here marketing is broken And there's gonna be two two two two things that are causing that we're forcing marketing to do sales Or marketing sucks. Okay, one of them.
We should stop making them do sales and let them do marketing or we should fire them in any marketing team. It's really easy I like that. All right. Let's let's move on to the next one.
Um Invite marketing into the sales process You know the reverse is not always been critical like marketers should go listen to calls and join calls and take calls and talk to the sales team and listen to calls So the flip is this like the sales team should be opening it up and here's a Access to my gong or my aboma here come join a call if you're the product marketing person Here's how the sales process works. Here's the stages we get to close a deal like really educating the marketing team on what actually happens in sales Um They kind of bridge the gap and kind of build that relationship. So what I often find is marketers don't take the time to do this They don't actually understand how the deal gets done What are the steps how many calls what happens on these calls? What's the sales team share?
How does how do you get to somebody to say yes? What's the conversation sound like on the phone? On zoom Thoughts. Yeah, I think a few things.
Um, I think that call recording software has come a long way and it's great I think it's often seen as like this savior of this problem and it's not the truth is there's so much that happens between calls Um outside of calls sometimes I'll be texting with ceos or we'll just call myself like so call recording software We have to be honest that it doesn't capture everything also. I find it really hard to believe there's something about the entire deal That matters. So if marketers am I gonna say what they're doing because I don't know what all of them are actually maybe there are some marketers that do this What about to say? But if you don't follow along with one entire deal, you probably didn't get any good insights You can't cherry pick discovery calls or closing calls, right?
You have to hear the whole Process to get the real insights because salespeople are connecting dots every single call it's it's building So if you miss the first two moments of building and the first two calls and you're only listening to the final closing call and hearing those objections Those aren't insights that you're gonna be able to really do anything with because they don't have context and sales is I mean This is so much context that's layered. It's very complex, you know, depending on your sales process, etc So I say all that to say that I think that you're right. I think sales should invite marketers They should create an environment where marketers feel safe to come and hang out with sales Maybe that's like a small cohort of like sellers that focus on like a pilot group or something I don't know. I would say that for marketers if you want that I don't know if you agree this Cassey, but I do think that marketers should lead that I don't know if sellers should be the initiators.
I think that marketers should and they should come to the process a lot of times marketers I've just happened to me in the past marketers was like, hey, Carl, can I just like come and hang out and this is like, why? Like there's no reason like you're wasting my time now. Like what do you need? I just want to talk to the like marketers should come with a process And then I think sellers would be a little bit more receptive But I think a lot of times it feels like random acts of marketing Is now infringing on my time and I don't understand what you're trying to do Why are you listening to that call?
Why are you asking these questions? So I think marketers overall could do a better job by saying this is what we want to do with sales Here's the process This is going to be most respectful to their time because we want them doing activities that drive revenue close to a new business And this is what we actually need, etc I think marketers should bring a process. Sales teams should create an environment where it's safe to collaborate in that way Yeah, there's a few there's a I like that. There's a few things in this that um, I see don't happen and where they kind of Both organizations talk by each other one is The market teams like communicating clearly that The insight derived from the sales process is immensely valuable in the education of future prospects and buyers This is why we want to spend time at the sales team Um, so we can understand what people are asking for that we struggle to answer so we can ensure that we're providing the proper Education and the inbound buying experience The flip side is the sales team why I think they need to be also reaching out and inviting them in is oftentimes what you get from the sales team is I need a brochure.
I need a demo. I need a ROI calculator And the marketing team's like what why? Walk me through like the good market would be like walk me through the entire journey and why this is important Most marketers just run off and do that And by the time that asset gets done eight weeks later the salesperson's on to the next thing they need And so I think by not trying to solve a point solution or point problem Which is why I'm pointing out and bring a framework in a system though like what am I trying to gain as far as insights? Either way to this process, you know, hold both of them out Um, I do think there's something you're saying here that's I'm called non-obvious and that is it's imperative Regardless of sales brings marketing or marketing comes with a framework or process to engage that you need to look at a deal end-to-end And that is I agree with that like being on both sides of this like that's how you learn It's all of those nuances in between so I love about marketers They always taught customer journey and they're proud to say like this prospect came to the website and they looked at these pages and they downloaded these documents and These ebooks etc etc.
They watched these demos and then um then they talked to sales and the journey's over The journey never is like the salesperson cuts 25 times had five calls Was on zoom three times don't relationships with five people in the buyer Committee and it took it, you know seven months to get this deal done. You never see that in a customer journey And so much happens in a sales process. I mean, it's exhausting. It's like it's a lot.
You're right It's messy. It's complicated. You're dealing with emotions. I think a lot of times marketers make a mistake where they're just dealing in like Headlines and subtitles and they're dealing in you know value props and they're thinking like really black and white about like Oh, what is it that they came for?
But man, it's like sellers know that they didn't just come for this solution for this problem There's politics involved in this. There's power dynamics internally in the company. There's competing priorities What are those I feel like product marketing and marketing in general like stops at problems and solutions? And it's just like well what about how companies stack rank those problems etc You know like all that's important and marketers don't get that and I feel like that would add another layer of depth a lot of the work that they do But you got to hang out with sales more and see a whole deal through and it's boring man.
A lot of it's boring like it's trudging through the mud It's complicated. It's frustrating and then there's these high points and low points and all these different, you know people internally think of markers really could like grass Like that they would unlock some insights that um could really level up their game and the whole company's game and to blame sales here, um, they could of course do a better job of Surfacing the stuff or flagging at least even having a system of flagging to say hey look I don't have time to give you all the details, but like this is a deal you should take a look at it's just a treasure chest of Insights that are buried in the ocean of a sales process that uh, you know companies just don't they don't mind and I think that's a it's a really big loss Something king of a mind-wider talking and that is What's your position on this notion that you know marketing? It's called the product marketer Tends to be the organization that creates the sales next But then they're not but they're not tied into the sales team. They're not spending that they're probably not doing all the things We're talking about it's on the sales side, you know, you get this deck from the marketing organization What's your?
Perspective are you like this is garbage? Like i'm just gonna like take a couple slides that look nice and do the rest of it myself They do discard it completely maybe your organization's where you have to use it even if it's not effective What's your thought on that? Yeah, I'm gonna speak for all the sellers that I probably ever worked with is that we pretty much discarded We use it as like a design template, I guess and then delete all the contents and all the contents and then just put our own stuff in it But at least it's design nice and we use the fonts and the design elements It's like it's like canva, you know, it's like you're just providing a template and then we just take it and do what we want with it I think that's probably the case for most here's a problem the the notion that one person or a team Let's say a product marketing can build a deck that is relevant for every deal. It has no context every business is different, you know I've seen decks like I want to bash up spot.
I love HubSpot But man, they were very product oriented decks, you know, it was like a slide with this feature and this feature It's like this isn't how it gets done, you know, and so that's it I think that's that's the insight you're trying to surface to your cash So he's like there's a disconnect between how a deal gets done a marketer thinks a deal gets done Not all marketers I'm just using that generally But marketing I think in general thinks that deal gets done by a salesperson finds a couple of problems and the tool solves them deals done And that's just not real world a deal gets done again in a lot of messiness a lot of complexity Yes, the solution plays a role in that but how you sell is why you win There's just a lot more that gets a deal done and you just have to be honest with yourself Like how many companies are there out there like yours that say the same things so obviously Um, there's more to it than just again problems and solutions. There's there's a whole other level and good sellers know how to That's their lever to close deals. Yeah, I'll end this by saying I think there's actually three levels There's a 10% of marketers and actually know how deals get done There's this group that you've talked about of marketers who think a deal gets done by just there's a couple problems and our product Magily solves it and the sales job ZZ There's a whole host of marketers that don't even know how a deal gets done They don't even under they probably don't even think like it's simple. They probably ask them How's the deal get done and they can't answer the question?
They don't know I don't know how to sell a job. I don't know how they close the deal. Yeah, I agree. I think it's a large percentage I don't know why that would be the case.
Um, maybe it's sales fault that'll create that environment where they can collaborate with marketing It's a CEO's fault. Let me just be very clear. It's a CEO's fault. Do you hire these people?
These are this your company? Um, I would be livid. I would never hire. I just like it just wouldn't happen in a company that I started Right.
So I think it goes honestly up to our friends any CEOs that are listening This is your fault. This is your problem If these two teams don't collaborate and you have them pitted against each other and they have the same exact goals Which is leads and close one revenue It's like there's a place for that But we you got to unpack and learn a little bit about the nuances of each of these roles And let these people do what they are supposed to be doing, right? So yeah, let me see you but this is Actually, when I posted this there was a comment about this is the CEO's fault And I can completely understand why It's that why that could be the case But here's my pushback on this and this is why I outlined one of the reasons I outlined this post There's obviously a senior revenue leader most cases. It could be the head of sales Sometimes it might be somebody from marketing it might be a president a CLO somebody zero When I struggle with especially early stage companies and startups like the issues always come back to the CEO It's like wait a minute like I hired this experienced person go fix this I don't know shit about sales and marketing.
I'm a product guy I hired you to fix this and now we have this uh Conflict and I hear it's my fault It's like it's why I hired this CRO for or the CMO for that's a good job, you know, like That's good. That's a powerful point Yeah, I think male uh, yeah, I don't know if you change my mind. I can't admit that publicly, but that is uh I mean we know there's a rational CEOs who think they know marketing and sales and they pit the teams together and it is Completely awful at running and growing a company inspiring people and there is that group of people that group of CEOs But oftentimes their most CEOs are listen I hired leaders to go fix these things and figure things out if i'm the one that has to figure everything out then our company's not gonna scale And cast the last thing I'll say to this oh an objection to your objection is okay. So that's fine What's the amount of time that a CEO is not on the hook?
I mean you've got to give these leaders six months, but you and I see this all the time We've got leaders that have been in a company for 18 same problems. They come in bound to us, you know They don't buy they come back nine months later So again, I'm gonna go back to the CEO at least in that instance I made this a grace period where the CEO doesn't isn't to blame But man like some of these CEOs let these problems just fester for years And then they fire these people and then they bring in the same types of people and then they let it happen all over again And so I think we're both right But I think there has to be like a grace period where it's like yes I've hired the cmo or the cr or the vps sales to fix this But if they don't like you have six months if this is it figured out I'm gonna step in you know, I think a lot of CEOs the last thing I'll say is that they just I don't know It's like they leave the room, you know, and they just like that's it Um, they never will come and revisit And they just let like these two kids I think of like a parenting analogy right like sales and marketing just fight forever and never figure out how to play together It's like where's the parent man like come on come and break this up. I don't know Yeah, I often wonder we see that quite a bit. I often wonder if that is because The ceo does not know how to or did not spend the time to identify The talent they need to bring into the team.
So maybe this is something we can look at when we see this going forward in our conversations with Customers and prospects and that is are we dealing with A marketing or sales leader or both that we actually think Can do the job or did the ceo bring in somebody who is just not ready for that role and therefore it falls on the ceo to be the one making these decisions Yeah, that falls on ceo though, doesn't it like they made they made a wrong hire like they They had they needed a leader to come and lead and then they hired like a marketing manager to do 40 things Um and that marketing manager has no experience leading an organization It's a complex issue, man I agree. All right, let's move on next one. We got this. I got two more hands big conversation All right fourth a line outbound sales within val marketing.
It's pretty tactical, but How many times we see this not happening? Yeah all the time never happens now and you know I'm working on this little secret framework in the basement. I'm passionate about this Again, it goes back to what I was saying. I think I'm point two or three where it's like outbound should be serving The things that marketing is doing really well already, right?
Like I should be talking to people who have visited the website etc So I mean the two definitely should be working together and often what we see is they're working separately either Outbound's trying to generate leads and marketing's trying to generate leads. It's absurd Well, I can't wait you drop the hint to the secret project you're working on the basement So I'm sure the audience will be eager to hear what that is when you're ready to You see my pictures in my notebook. It's really compelling stuff so far my pencil drawings Need some design work, but sure it's moving right direction Um what I find interesting here is like they don't even know that they're fishing in largely the same pond And then you have like an outbound team fishing in this pond coming up with their own messaging and positioning story They get a marketing team over here running campaigns to the same You know audience and they're coming up with different messaging and positioning and assets and so forth And these are kind of like two shifts just kind of Moving along by each other Floating through a storm. Yeah exactly.
It's uh, it's absurd and you know, I blame somebody asked a good question on LinkedIn The other day they asked me if salespeople should be comps more for deals that they source and I said no, of course not Because that's going to de-incentivize working in bounds and working with marketing why that makes me a lone ranger Oh, I want to get paid more. I'm going to be incentivized. I'm going to be biased towards more money So I'm just going to go do outbound and ignore anything that marketing's doing So even like the conplan is critical in aligning these two departments and they have to be working together Why do you think it doesn't happen? This seems very like you know, you got your marketing team and or marketing agency and you got your sales team and or like outbound consulting company helping you and like it like the playbooks the Everything that's done they kind of set these things up.
No one's talking to each other What's going on? Process I think I think it's process. It's part of what I'm working on There's not an engine that anyone that I can find has designed to have these two departments like volleying I think of like pickleball or tennis. They're not like volleying back and forth information that they have their silo So sales is working in their stuff and all they have to rocket reach and sales loft And so that's all they used to go outbound They don't see that the marketing team is doing retargeting.
They don't see who's visiting the website They don't see who's interacting with marketing stuff. They don't see you signed up for certain newsletters, etc So there's I think that's the first thing is visibility into what everyone's doing And then the next thing is a process sellers don't have a prop like they're given lists and they call them They don't know how to like necessarily Read language how you would reach out to somebody that is warmed up to you, you know, their scripts are very black and white They don't know how to adjust. That's why whenever you sign up for a webinar and you get an SDR outreach And they're like, you know, oh, I saw that you signed up for the webinar. Do you want to demo?
This is all the reasons why it's like there's like this clash like it's disconnected You know what I'm saying? It's like they're trying to drive just forced me into the pipeline Why why is that? I blame the salesperson because they're human beings and they're adults and they should be able to think for themselves But I also blame leadership teams to be like this is how we are going to handle these certain different audiences sales treats Everyone like they're ice cold and like they're all ready to buy right now So I think that's what breaks it, right? There's no nuance and the sales team has never been held accountable to that nuance, you know, so I think there's probably more to that answer but well, I want to come back to that point in another episode Because I understand we all need to be empathetic to the SDR function and it's not really them It's lack of sales leadership.
I don't care what it is But the amount of garbage I get on LinkedIn and in my inbox and now getting text messages It's like man. You got sales. You got sales guys got to fix this. It's ridiculous.
It's fascinating But that I digress. We'll talk about that so other time. All right, let's go on to number five Lead by example and don't let sales off the hook the reason I wrote this I'll give it to you from a different perspective. I've been in situation where I was a marketing leader I took over the sales team and while I had a great relationship with the sales organization One of their concerns obviously would be I always favor the marketing team So it was important for me to make sure that there were no favorites that we're just gonna do what's best for the business And if the marketing team's not carrying their weight, I'm gonna call them out the sales team's not carrying their weight Same thing.
I think this is important the other way especially because typically what we'll see is sales leaders taking over the marketing team That's in general when you think about a CRO function Or an SVP of sales you tend to see the sale as we talked earlier the sales leaders more senior person has more clout So these organizations are gonna come together in any way or somebody's gonna have authority over the other informally or formally It's typically the sales leader and so it's important that the sales leader is not Sales can do no wrong and it's all marketing's fault They need to be focused on and leading by we're just gonna do what's best for the customer and what's best for the company And here's how we're gonna measure each these these organizations And if sales isn't carrying their weight, they're gonna hear it and if marketing needs to do something better They're gonna hear it and you know, the person's pretty unbiased in that relationship I feel like the reason I pointed this out is the bias happens a lot I believe is what I hear often from marketers when the sales person's in charge I'll stop there Yeah, I uh I feel like it's a little bit of a cop out. I don't know if you feel like it feels like it feels like an excuse to me Like ah, they're just like whining to the CEO, you know, like you're just love you just like you like your sales more than me I don't know man. I think that uh, I think that sales is pretty like self accountable Like it's usually the culture of a sales team to be accountable. I mean We can't hide marketers can hide You know sometimes behind results or like vague results or lack of results or you know The time lagging nature of marketing results like take some time etc The sales thing is a pretty accountable group I mean our results are on a dashboard for the entire company to see 24 seven, you know, so Um, yeah, I don't know if you like I don't know if that answers your question or that's the comment that you were kind of looking for but It's more subtle.
Um And I I agree the sales seems a little more accountable, but they also have their excuses of course My point here is that I lost a deal because I didn't do the right thing. We know that You're the exception My point is a little more subtle and that is you're ahead of sales and you have an opportunity To take a larger role in the company. Maybe you're running marketing. Maybe informally you're the scr And you have more influence even though marketing isn't rolling up under you It's important when that happens to you in your career that you understand you just moved From a sales leader to like a revenue leader Yeah, or you're running multiple teams and so your purview Needs to change Like you need to be able to put your arms around that other organization and make sure you're developing them And they may have a longer way to go than your sales organization Probably they do because the reason you've been quote promoted is because the sales is doing well Their sales has been around longer, right?
It's typically the first the first team to kind of get built in the revenue work, right? So it's just been around long it's more mature It's important that you know when you're in that role what you don't know and what else and see I get just I see this often like sales leaders We're getting charged in marketing and they're like think they know how to do marketing and like they just fuck the whole thing up Because they're not really thinking about like how do I lead an organization? They're rather just saying like how do I get marketing to do the things I need for my sales team? Right, but that's not your job or function anymore your job your function is to build a viable world-class organization Unvisely, yeah, um you've heard me say this before I don't understand on podcasts or not But um like a lot of times sales leaders are biased towards marketing serving sales and I actually think it's the opposite I think that sales should be like certain like marketing is kind of the center of the revenue work and marketing really serves I'm sorry sales really serves marketing They can bring eyeballs to marketing's content via albound and kind of in a role this idea that I have a very Enrollment of cold contacts into what marketing's doing and then sales also is responsible for taking the good stuff that marketing does And making sure it's handled well in the sales process and close because the organization pays top dollar for if Assuming the marketing mortgage is doing well, you're paying top dollar right for those leads for the for real high intent um folks, you know, it's coming about through website, etc So yeah, I wonder if uh, we'll see a rise of you know, you see a lot of CROs that come from the sales background I wonder if we're gonna start to see the the flip of that happen.
We're actually CROs that have a marketing background and they so the piece of marketing becomes CROs instead of vice versa I do think that that's where the world of revenue and b2b is going is marketers actually taking marketing and marketers taking kind of center stage And that political dynamic that we've seen historically that sales has more clout. I think we'll flip Yeah, I mean as a former marketer, I would like to think that and I feel like this has been a prediction For a while now that hasn't materialized Yeah, and it's an interesting discussion at some point around why not because it feels logical based on where things are going But it feels like in the b2b space that just hasn't happened. I mean obviously there's cases of it So not I'm saying spaces are growing I think they I think they're growing and I think that they will I don't know, you know, I see it's it's cool now. I think we're fine lives has been at the forefront of this I think it's way cooler now to run demand creation versus lead gen I think I feel like that's maybe it's just like a microcosm that we're in But I feel like we are going to see Less and less lead gen and more demand creation and with that I think marketing is going to now start to be seen as that's just doing marketing better Right, and so I think now it's like cool marketing is doing better.
They're driving results Now they're going to become kind of at the forefront of the I don't know I feel like that shift is going to buoy the shift that we haven't quite seen yet I've said this on LinkedIn last thing I'll say about this product like growth Product like growth is so it sexy and popular now and I think it's really just a mask for marketing leg growth So I again, this is another point that I'm trying to make it's booing Marketers as the most important revenue leaders in an organization and I can see that the evidence of how the proof of that is product leg growth There's no product that drives acquisitions for itself. So the term itself is stupid It's marketers that are driving huge amounts of users and then the product is built thoughtfully and people adopt more of it and share it with their friends Etc, but that's marketing led, you know, so I don't know Those are my two points of proof. I guess that those are the two things I see that are going to I think shift and catapult marketers into more important positions. Maybe I'm wrong So carls completely gone off the rails PLG is marketing led in sales supports marketing.
I know I'm just throwing out of it. You're gonna be thrown off LinkedIn I'm gonna be thrown off of the LinkedIn. I'll give you one of my end and that is lead gen is not marketing Period. I love your idea of like the evolution to demand gen from lead gen Yeah, but like I would go further and be like listen if you're doing lead gen, you're not a marketer Dude, we've talked.
I mean gosh. We talked about this ad nauseam. It's not anything. It's not sales.
It's not it's I don't know what it is I don't know why it's a thing. I'm sorry. I do know why it's a thing It's a thing because rocket reach and zoom info hasn't been around forever lead gen made perfect sense 15 years ago when these platforms weren't in existence It was the only way to get email information contact information to get somebody enrolled, right? But it's completely irrelevant today to capture emails.
It's shocking. I just I don't I can't run my mind around it That's the best definition I it's around because Marchetto and HubSpot needed a way to sell software and they came up with this strategy Yeah, and marketers are sheep and they just keep doing it. So 15 years later Man, it's like it's not even like okay. You got sold by a good idea by HubSpot 15 years ago.
You know what cool That's fine But now you just buy a database that's constantly updated with email addresses I just can't wrap my mind around why I would spend a single dollar. Cassie, you know how much it costs for like I look at our customers Accounts and sometimes it's cost two three four hundred bucks for an email address off LinkedIn. So in some cases We already have it. I just I can't I need someone to explain it to me Is it because we think that there's intent?
Is that we're paying for? Oh, this person is interested because they converted on something like Why not just drive into the website and now the sales team knows that they were on the website Even though they didn't convert on anything you can sit with there's plenty of tools out there to tell you they were on the website Now I go into LinkedIn sales now and I can do my prospecting and I already have their contact information Like why is that not the cycle in the process? I don't get it man. I mean Carl, of course you have intent if you've downloaded my Seven ways to the obvious ebook you open three of the last 15 newsletters And you accidentally clicked on the link to the website and I caught that like that ends up, you know You're intense high in that situation.
You're right That's the only need to follow up on that the lead score engine is just dinging right the bell is dinging Oh, what I put like a fake email address as well. So, um, yeah, my intent is super high Just a waste of time and waste of time waste of money. You know anyways We're gonna have to keep beating this and I was in because man So many marketers out there are still doing Legion and I don't get it and it's not even obvious to them When you say listen to the entire database out there and I can get a contact record for 33 cents like Marmos workers look at you with a blank stare like what you're talking about Yeah, it's like it doesn't register like they don't like they're like what's your point? It's like you paid for something that you have What does not it's how to understand how it doesn't register, you know, it's like you got you got stakes in the fridge That you bought from Costco for 999 a pound But then you went and bought that stake again for $400 a pound.
I don't get it man But just got stakes in the fridge Cassidy I may need to post this. I'm listen. I I got the campaign idea the end of Legion Rocket reach Lucia cognizant The end of Legion campaign That's fourth meal man. That's Taco Bell That is the campaign that is going to send one of these data providers into the next era of growth I buy The end of Legion.
I want to end or some meal campaign. That's it. I want it. Anything else we should talk about that's too long I thought I was going to yeah, man.
We're at an hour and four minutes So nobody's gonna listen this long. So what are we talking about now? We're gonna be making it hard if you made it this far, please reach out to me on LinkedIn and I'll send you a gift By the way, I'm gonna end one last question. Anybody reach out to you about your $1,000 pizza whiskey.
Nope. Nope. No, nobody can justify Legion works, man That's perfect. I'm gonna post it again.
I'm gonna post something again on what we talked about today and I'm gonna see if I get any takers I want someone to answer the question. Why do you capture emails on form if you already own them and sales already owns them? I need someone to answer that question for me I'm just it's a real question. I'm just baffled and I want to learn I mean because they take the time to fill out this foreign car.
They want to buy our products I just I want somebody to say that I want someone to say it so that I just believe that the absurdity is true because I still feel like I'm taking crazy bills Yeah, we'll see Alright, let's let's let's recap them. This is the best practice. What are the five things we talked about today? Number one quality of a quantity number two encourage building awareness Number three invite marketing in the sales process for a line outbound sales with a marketing and the last is leave by example And don't let sales off the hook.
You heard the debate. You can believe those or not But those were the five. I enjoyed it Carl. That was fun.
Same. Happy Friday. You have to get Friday. Bye