Salient Sales Enablement Solutions

 

Drew Neisser: Hey, it’s Drew. And I’m guessing that as a podcast listener, you will also enjoy audiobooks. Well in that case, did you know the audio version of Renegade Marketing: 12 Steps to Building Unbeatable B2B Brands, was recently ranked the number one new B2B audio book by Book Authority. Kind of cool, right? Anyway, you can find my book on Audible or your favorite audio book platform.

And speaking of audio before we get into today’s show, I do want to do a shout out to the professionals that Share Your Genius. We started working with them several months ago to make this show even better, and have been blown away by their strategic and executional prowess. If you’re thinking about starting a podcast or want to turbocharge your current show, be sure to talk to Rachel Downey at shareyourgenius.com and tell her Drew sent you.

Okay, let’s get on with today’s episode.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade Drew Neisser.

Drew Neisser: Hello, Renegade Marketers Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite the top rated podcast for B2B CMOs and other marketing obsessed individuals.

You’re about to listen to a recording of CMO Huddles Studio, our live show featuring the CMOs of CMO Huddles—a community that sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness every day of the week. This time we’ve got a conversation with Huddles, Sara Larson of Wolters Kluwer Health, Peter Fincher of Cyber GRX, and Carlos Karva Hall of Q2. Like episode 342, they also discuss sales enablement. But since I was discovering the wildlife of the Galapagos, we had two guest hosts, Brian Neil and Bill Caskey from the popular Advanced Selling Podcast.

It’s a great episode. So let’s dive in.

Brian Neil: You’re like who are these guys? Well, welcome to CMO Huddle Studio. We are Bill and Brian from the Advanced Selling Podcast.

Bill Caskey: I’m nervous.

Brian Neil: I’m nervous too, well and the question is, are we nervous because we’re hosting and taking over someone else’s show? Or are we because there’s a bunch of marketing people that are going to tell us how much salespeople suck? That’s the thing. Now Drew’s in a little cool place. So Drew, who you normally see here, is in the Galapagos. And I thought, isn’t that where like Charles Darwin went?

Bill Caskey: That’s exactly right.

Brian Neil: He studied all the hell like, so I just, I don’t know what Drew’s doing. I don’t know if he’s on the beach. Or if he’s studying those birds. There’s like special birds that live there, aren’t there? I’m not sure.

Bill Caskey: There are. But he’s probably got his little Wi Fi antenna listening in to make sure we don’t screw this up.

Brian Neil: He might beyes. But we’re very, very gracious that he asked us to come in and sit in. So hey to everybody. And we’re  guessing you’re here because you’re either a marketing person to hear our fabulous guests talk about marketing, and the relationship between sales and marketing and sales enablement marketing, or you’re a salesperson, and you want to hear if Bill and I can hang with the CMOs.

Bill Caskey: I don’t know, when I was listening to some past episodes to kind of get a hang of it, Drew is really good. You’re really good at this.

Brian Neil: How about that intro? The intro video was awesome.

Bill Caskey: And he was asking questions, and I’m like, oh, gosh, I don’t think I can ask a question like that. And every time he asked a question that guests would go, “Oh, man, Drew, that’s a good question.” Oh, are we gonna be able to hang with?

Brian Neil: Can we hang out? Can we hang? Yeah, so we’re gonna talk about marketing and sales today, how they go together, we get some great guests. We’re gonna bring them in here in a moment, and meet everybody and then rock and roll from there. Get on.

Bill Caskey: Yeah. So for those of you who don’t know who we are, we host a podcast called the Advanced Selling Podcast. And we have for 17 years 11 million and some downloads and a lot of people on LinkedIn. And we talked mostly in that podcast about sales. But I’ve noticed that over the past few years, we’re kind of wading into the marketing world, because a lot of times the sales team is also responsible for lead generation, marketing positions, and things like that. So even though we’re sales guys, we still wade into the troubled waters of marketing sometimes now I’m really looking forward to this because I learned a lot just listening to some of the past episodes.

Brian Neil: 100%, and I think all of us need to get focused here on the same problem. We’re all in the same business. We’re all looking to help customers and improve the results for our own businesses at the same time and pick up a check for that because we’re capitalists, that’s part of the deal, right? And there’s so much angst sometimes between marketing and selling so much fingerpointing, we’re gonna kind of let that all dissipate today and see, how can we come together? Right. That’s what this is all about. Let me see. I would also say just as a little statement upfront, for those of you who’ve listened to our show for a while, we’re actually kind of marketing oriented. Would you agree, Bill?

Bill Caskey: I think so. Yeah.

Brian Neil: Yeah, I think we, number one, we see the value of personal branding for salespeople. We talked about that all the time on our show, we do it by us and our pie, we got a podcast for 17 years, we’re big into that. And we think it’s the best way to take messages out into a marketplace is through branding and marketing and that sort of thing. We’re really excited to be here. It’s gonna be awesome. But like you said, a little nervous. These CMOs were really smart humans.

Bill Caskey: They are. And I was telling my wife, I said, you know, it’s kind of like, we’re stepping into Drew’s home here, and we’re having to run the home. And she says, good thing he’s not a heart surgeon. We wouldn’t be lost if he was a heart surgeon we’re trying to come in, but he’s a podcast host.

Brian Neil: So we can handle that one. Yeah, it’s good. So ready to meet some guests?

Bill Caskey: Yeah, let’s bring it.

Brian Neil: Here’s our friend Peter Finter. Peter, what’s up? Here’s a CMO of Cyber GRX. Welcome back. How you doing? Where are you? How are you today?

Peter Finter: I am in wonderful Silicon Valley right here in the heart of crashing banks and all things good. We can get into that in a minute. If we can combine Silicon Valley Bank and chatGPT we got ourselves a hot podcast.

Brian Neil: It’s true.

Peter Finter: So yeah, great to be with you guys. Cyber GRX is actually based out of Denver, Colorado. So I spent my time traversing ski locations.

Brian Neil: Smart man. Now you’ve got some sales experience in your past. So can you talk about your early formative experience in sales, and how that has helped you, as you run marketing at Cyber GRX.

Peter Finter: Yeah, and you’re right, I did spend quite a bit of time in sales before I got into marketing. But even before that I was in engineering. So that’s a really wild ride, to go through that. But you know, I got into the sales space, because I recognize that this is where all the action is, it’s right there in the interface with the customer is the engaging with the customer where all the energy is, and frankly, all the excitement is one of the best things about being in sales, for me was just that high experience of closing that deal, of being there in that moment, of seeing the lights go on, and wanting to replicate and repeat that across a broader scale is one of the reasons why I got into marketing in the first place. But I think one of the things that really struck me about the world of sales is just how much rests on the shoulders of that one person, that seller and the the responsibility that they have, the pressure that’s on the shoulders is so enormous, they simply cannot be successful on their own, and nor should we ask them to be. And that was one of the things that I took away, which is how important it is for you to be able to work with the team. And to bring the resources to the table, no one can know everything about everything. And to your point earlier, there are a lot of smart people in our organization to leverage them in the selling experience. And one of those groups of smart people should be your marketing team. So it was really how do I get marketing to help me. And frankly, they didn’t do all the help that I wanted. And so reason why I ended up getting back into marketing, or moving into marketing was because I thought to myself, somebody’s got to be able to help these guys out. Turned out to be me.

Brian Neil: I love it, taking the flag. It’s great.

Bill Caskey: That’s what we find a lot of times when we go into organizations, we typically work with a VP of sales and sales team, but a lot of times the marketing department is less than—they’re not really doing the job. So I have a question. How do you ensure in your organization and others you’ve been in that sales and marketing really do work together? What are a few tips you can leave our listeners with?

Peter Finter: The first thing is really about shared goals and success criteria. Like how are you measuring your success as a marketing leader? We know how the salespersons success has been measured, they’re the most visible, transparent people on the plane from that point of view. The question really is, how much skin is in the game? Because I think we’re all familiar with this concept. One of my former bosses used to describe it as the “blazing green scorecard.” Marketing would come up to the QBR and they would show their quarterly results and everything looked amazing or hit all their lead targets. Everything was awesome. But sales missed its number. That disconnect is the root of all evil as far as sales—marketing relationships are concerned. So first thing is skin in the game. The second thing is, is there clarity around roles and responsibilities. You know, a friend of mine used to say “Accidents happen at intersections.” The reality is it’s where those handoffs are occurring, where’s the baton being passed? If both of you enter the intersection, you’re bound to have a collision. If neither of you enter, then there is no communication, there’s a gap. There’s a set of rules with facts. I think the third thing is mutual accountability to each other. What are we holding each other accountable to? And are we willing to be vulnerable with one another that to me is the biggest and best relationships I’ve ever had, from marketing sales point of view, is where there’s a willingness to acknowledge failure, and weakness, and address that together. If you can own it together and say, “Okay, we have a problem with messaging, we have an issue with pricing and packaging, or we aren’t getting those events to deliver those results or our lead quality suffering, we have too many fake leads getting into the mix.” If you’re willing to acknowledge those things before one another, that’s a huge sign that you actually have a working relationship that can go on. The last thing I would just say is regular communication and cadence meetings. Make it a regular thing. If you are waiting to for your partner to call you, you don’t call them, guess what, that’s not a working relationship. There’s a few thoughts based on my experience.

Brian Neil: Brilliant. We love doing the podcast because we always learn stuff. I’ve never heard that “accidents happen intersections.”

Bill Caskey: That’s exactly right.

Brian Neil: It’s unbelievable. I’m like, I’ve never ever heard that. So that’s stolen. Thank you, Peter. And I’d love for you to say “baton” over and over and over. Because it’s so beautiful. When you say “baton” instead of my American version. That’s just fantastic. So let me ask you this, because I came from Procter & Gamble, big marketing driven company. And I was in sales at P&G. Now we felt—to Bill’s point—at P&P as a salesperson, I felt lower than marketing, marketing really ran the brands and tide and crest and that sort of thing. We were just sort of like catching everything. That sort of thing. The rub we always had, and I want your comments on this, was marketing is never set in our shoes, they don’t get what’s really going on. I feel like you do, that’s why you’re here and why we’re talking. Could you give your the CMO audience and the sales audience some advice or some insight into “you don’t understand me” vibe, that feeling how do we break those barriers down?

Peter Finter: It’s a great question. And it’s not an easy thing to answer. Because you know, if you’ve not walked in the shoes, you really don’t know, and maybe you never will. But you will get close to it. And I think one of the things that salespeople can do to really help marketers is to bring marketers into their experience. It’s like, come along on that call, listen in or even just review call recordings, you know, many marketers now are running BDR teams, and maybe that’s for the first time in their careers, they’re starting to understand a little bit more about sales experience, because that BDR team really does sit at that intersection, it should be 100% part of sales, and 100% part of marketing to be effective, it’s a special place. But whether that exists or not in your marketing world, get your sellers to engage you directly in the customer experience. Not just to the happy customers, get them in front of the tough ones, the ones that are really putting the screws onto the sales guys, and live that world. And the more that you can take that on, the more empathy you’re going to have. And the more likely you are to be able to respond to the assets that come through your sales team.

Brian Neil: It’s brilliant. Love that.

Yes, good. So last thing, Peter, what is working? We’ve talked a little bit like, Okay, what do you do when it’s broken? It’s fixed. Tell us please at Cyber GRX, what is working in relationship between marketing and sales.

Bill Caskey: I love the intersection thing—back to that real quickly—because there’s that marketing sales intersection where if the salesperson shows up with a message totally different than what the marketing message was, then we’re out of sync, we’re out of congruence. And the other place that happens is with the BDR, the business development person who’s making the calls, and then they pass it over to the salesperson and the customer. Sometimes it’s like, “Well, where did where did Peter go? I have somewhat of a relationship with Peter. And now I’ve got Brian here.” And I think that’s really so critical that people hear that. And then you ask yourself, well, where are the intersections in our business? That we’re not taking care of or we’re not mindful of?

Peter Finter: So I’ll go back to what I said was important in the relationship, I think the fact that we have a shared vision, we have a shared strategy, and we are problem solving together, I think is huge. And that really is a team sport. And we are a high growth company, we added a lot of people into our sales team, a lot of new leaders. So we’re constantly having to recreate and continue that kind of spirit, but introduce other people into it. That’s not that easy to do. But essentially, if you can build partnerships at every level, and I really can see that happening at Field Marketing, at sales leader to head of demand generation CRO, CMO, if you can get those layers all synced up. That is enormous. And I would just go back to my BDR team for a second really effective 100% in sales, 100% in marketing. Those are some really great things. And as a result, we’ve got a lot of confidence both ways in the team that were standing shoulder to shoulder that we’re both responsible for the outcomes and we take the pain together, but we also celebrate the victories together.

Bill Caskey: One team, it’s one team.

Brian Neil: Same thing. That’s what he said. Yeah, everyone’s after the same thing in the end, aren’t we? Yeah, brilliant Peter.

Okay. We’ll see you in a little bit.

We’ll let you go to the green room. There’s some M&Ms in there and some snacks.

You’re gonna love the snacks. We did read your writer Peter. So we do have the titanium straws and the blue and gray M&Ms have been sorted.

Peter Finter: Appreciate it guys.

Bill Caskey: So let’s bring on let’s bring on Sarah Larson. Sarah is our second guest.

Sara Larsen: Hi, gentlemen.

Brian Neil: Hi, Sarah. How you doing today? How are ya?

Sara Larsen: I believe sales people are people too. So it’s okay that you’re sales.

Brian Neil: Thank you. You’re the best. Thank you, Sara.

Sara Larsen: I’m in Boston today.

Brian Neil: Austin? Today or everyday.

Sara Larsen: No, Boston. Not Austin.

Brian Neil: No, yeah. Boston Do you live in Boston? You from there?

Sara Larsen: Yeah. Sitting in Lexington today just outside of Boston.

Brian Neil: Oh, beautiful love Boston.

Bill Caskey: Sara is VP of Marketing at Wolters Kluwer health. And we just talked to Peter Finter a little bit. So we’ll ask you some of those same questions, what kind of background did you have in sales before you launch your marketing career? Or did you have one? Because that’s kind of our line of questioning here is how sales and marketing coexist and get along and get their goals accomplished. So tell us a little bit.

Sara Larsen: I don’t think I’ve ever been smart enough to be in sales. So I had my early sales career with multi channel distribution of Girl Scout cookies. So there was that. But it probably one of my more formative experiences on the sales side was earlier in my career in setting up online commerce and helping—I was at IBM at the time—and helping IBM set up their first online commerce program and taking, you know, traditional selling models and products and solutions and services than getting them into an online store. And that probably fed a lot of my interest in just understanding how do people buy, you know, what are what are buying behaviors and because you know, when in ecommerce, its marketing, and sales, and CX all sort of smashed together into one space, so got a lot of taste of several domains in that role, and then moved more into the marketing side.

Brian Neil: I was gonna ask about, because we talked earlier, the relationship between sales and marketing, you’ve probably heard that when you were in the green room, eating the blue and silver M&Ms, as I know you were. Talk about it at Walters, how’s the relationship? What’s it like? What’s working? Talk about that.

Sara Larsen: Yeah, it’s interesting. So I support three different sales teams. So they all have three different needs. It’s like, you know, I don’t want to call them three different children with different needs, you could apply that. And I think, you have to have a foundational alignment, right, you have to have foundation alignment at the business layer, Peter talked about that around aligned to pipeline aligned to revenue stream. But then you have to go a little deeper on what are the actual needs at that point in time for that sales organization. We have one organization that’s totally focused on new business in not as mature markets, another organization highly mature market, big renewal business, a lot of focus on renewal, and upsell, right. So there’s, we could be aligning on a pipeline number for those two organizations, but they have very different needs for marketing. A third organization is going through work to get very segmented, hyper segmented and much more targeted, a lot of marketing needs there around targeted campaigns need data, new messaging, etc. So you can align on the numbers, but you have to align on what’s behind the numbers, too.

Brian Neil: That’s a lot of stuff. So a lot of stuffs there.

Bill Caskey: Brian and I have a common friend here in Indianapolis, and he runs a digital marketing agency. And he says, the role—and I’d like to ask you this—the role of marketing is to make it easier to buy and easier to sell, make the product or the service easier. What is the role of marketing at your company, just a kind of a 30,000 foot view?

Sara Larsen: I’d say 30,000 foot view is to you know, one there’s the business contribution, like that, is just rock solid, we have to contribute to the pipeline of revenue. But I think how we do that is really through, how do we communicate the value of our solutions? How do we communicate that not just in a marketing campaign, but in all of our customer touchpoints between marketing, sales and even thinking about our CX touchpoints and lifecycle. And that’s probably the the number one thing, people don’t call me up and say, I need more leads, they call me and say how can I communicate with even more value to this particular role that is now buying committee and that role wasn’t there years ago, and now I need to communicate to that role? So that’s where I spend a lot of my time.

Brian Neil: That’s an evolved sales team, if they’re asking you that. Because a lot of teams I think Bill and I are interact with are a little more selfish. They’re like, “Sir, where are our leads? We just got more leads.”

Sara Larsen: And that’s the other thing, I think marketers are learning the relative source of the lead and why a lead is a lead. Workers have to explain it. I can’t just tell you, “Hey, Brian, I gave you 10 leads this month.” “I gave you 10 leads, three of them are coming out of finance. We know those people buy this way. Three of them coming out of IT. They’re Junior but I know that you’ve got to call them because they’re going to be your data gathering right now to do a presentation up up to their CIO.” And so marketing has that buying committee insight and they’ve got to get that to sales faster. Can’t just be a toss over the fence of a lead in sales.

Brian Neil: Yeah, so great. Isn’t it? Your use the word support earlier on. If you know, you said that Sara, “I support three sales teams, three sales functions.” That mentality alone, to me, is extremely encouraging and refreshing.

Sara Larsen: Yeah, I found if marketing thinks they’re better than sales or sales things they’re better than marketing, like neither, of you gonna win. At the end of the day, an alined team wins when get that buying committee together, and we close a deal. And it takes a village on that. And I don’t know, it’s so funny, because you spent all this time you’ve probably seen all these charts on buyer journeys, they all look linear. It doesn’t work that way. Right. It’s like a layer cake. And it all has to come together at the end.

Bill Caskey: Yeah, I see sales, people’s eyes glaze over sometimes when you start talking about the buyer journey. And it’s one of those terms has been used and used. Could you define that for us? Not necessarily at your company. But no, because I think everybody needs to understand exactly what is it. I don’t mean specifically, but just generally give us a definition of the “buyer journey.”

Sara Larsen: So I think the buyer journey is for the people that are going to be in the influencing and decision phase of your product or solution. And what are those roles? And what information needs do they have? What pain points do they have? And then how are you going to respond on value to those? How are you going to say, look, you know, I hear Bill that it’s really hard for you do X, Y and Z. And that probably means that you’re thinking about a solution like this, can I tell you what value we provide? We have solved some of those problems in the past. We’d like to figure out how we could solve yours. That’s the buyers journey. You can look at all kinds of ways to bring that conversation to market emails and events and all kinds of tactics. But at the end of the day, you have to have that value message. That speaks specifically to the pain point of someone on your buying committee.

Brian Neil: Yes. It’s brilliant. Bravo. Okay, we’re gonna come see you here in a little bit. You get to go back to the green room, right?

Sara Larsen: I’ll go eat those M&Ms!

Brian Neil: Exactly.

Bill Caskey: If Peter hasn’t eaten them all, he probably has consumed them all. But anyway, yes. You let us know if they’re not there.

Brian Neil: Oh, that’s so great. I love it. Drew’s gonna come back to what did you guys do with the M&Ms? I’ve got all my guests are asking me for these special M&Ms.

Bill Caskey: Well, you know, I was thinking, you know, you and I love music. And I thought well, maybe we could play some music as we started. I thought no, he’d probably get in trouble from some licensing. You get the whole thing crashed. We get Drew sued.

Bill Caskey: Our next guest is Carlos Carvajal. He is the CMO of Q2. Carlos, welcome.

Brian Neil: Exactly.

Carlos Carvajal: What’s up? Hey, Bill. Hey, Brian, good to speak with you.

Brian Neil: Where are you? And how are you? I know the answer. But I want you to tell our audience where are you? And how are you?

Carlos Carvajal: I am in Austin, Texas. And I’m doing awesome. But it’s a good time to be in Austin right now.

Brian Neil: Awesome.

Carlos Carvajal: Different than July, August when it’s like 110 degrees. So good.

Bill Caskey: So everyone’s moving to Austin, aren’t they? I mean, it’s either Nashville, Austin. Miami Beach. Isn’t Austin like huge influx of population now?

Carlos Carvajal: Yeah. Austin’s horrible. Like they should stop, absolutely terrible. Yeah there’s a lot of people moving in for sure.

Brian Neil: Okay, so we’re talking sales stuff today, Carlos. So we, I want you if you can just go back in your own career? Usually, not always, usually, some marketers have had some sales experience. Can you go and recall any sales experience in the past? And what you learn from it? And how you use it now in your role as a CMO?

Carlos Carvajal: Yeah, just briefly, so I’ve worked with sales a lot in different roles. So that a little bit of developments, spent lot of my career in product, right. So products teams up with salespeople a lot, especially just how you deal with clients, prospects, etc, then shifted into marketing. But I did have a brief stint in inside sales, right. And part of it was, we actually wanted to pilot and see if we could sell a certain solution, which is fairly complex, and do it entirely over the phone. And so basically went through that for about six to nine months. But then the company ended up getting acquired. And that experiment pretty much ended it at the point of acquisition. But I did learn some interesting things along the way. It’s kind of funny, you know, a lot of times when you come from product and even from other orgs, you’re thinking, “Hey, we have the best product, why aren’t we winning? We should always win.” Like product capability, all this kind of stuff. And it’s a different mindset. And when you actually are in the role, and I think Peter said it well, there’s just so much to the deal and everything that could go on, things can go wrong. You have everybody. Do you have the buying committee involved? Are you talking to the right people? There’s change, there’s organizational change that comes down to the mess up a decision. So there’s just a lot of learning that you really appreciate once you’re actually in the role things that influence deals. But one takeaway that I had that really hit me is, when you’re going through a deal, I’d say a process for four to six months, and you’re going through a bunch of calls, and you got to stop and think these prospects are talking to you. And they’re probably talking to four or five other vendors. And they’re hearing a lot over that four to six months. So at the end of the process, I’m talking to these accounts. And I’m thinking, man, they have so much in their head, so much they’ve captured, so much write down, how do we really succinctly put together why us right, yeah. And helping with a proposal and late stage content, things like that—I hadn’t really thought about that normally, in marketing, because you’re thinking, in many cases, higher up the funnel, right? Back to Bill’s point, like leads, where are my leads? I need messaging, I need sales decks, I need this, I need that. And that was one takeaway. I was like, we got to look down the funnel to this point as far as the entire  buying journey, because a lot of times it boils down to that last decision when they’re sitting in a meeting room have that debate, right? And how do you actually plant something at that point in time, that actually puts the decision in your favor? So that that was one takeaway.

Brian Neil: That’s brilliant. And that to me, like these days now, more than ever, because of the mass ability to get information at our fingertips, people are bombarded and they need ways to sort it out. Don’t they? At the end especially because they’re hearing all these messages. I’ve never thought about that that way too. Because we do, we kind of plant marketing people upfront, don’t we? And it’s really great to hear that.

Carlos Carvajal: Traditional focus. Yeah. What do you want to what do you want to land right at the most critical point in time?

Brian Neil: Absolutely.

Bill Caskey: Carlos, what’s one thing that a sales team, it doesn’t necessarily have to be at Q2, but over the years, you’ve been working with sales team, what’s one thing salespeople just don’t understand about marketing? And the function they should play? That question was not on the script here. So I’m coming out of nowhere.

Brian Neil: Exactly, Carlos is like, “Did I misread the prep sheet?”

Carlos Carvajal: So basically, one thing that salespeople don’t understand. And then what was the second part of that I just missed the second part.

Bill Caskey: What is one thing that salespeople don’t understand about the role that marketing plays? And how that can help them? Because marketing is there to help support, as Sara said. What’s one thing that maybe it’s a misconception that salespeople have about marketing?

Carlos Carvajal: Yeah, I mean, I’ll give kind of the easy answer. And then I’ll dive deeper into a few other areas. But the easy answer, because it goes beyond sales, quite frankly, it’s the classic brand awareness, right? The PR in the relationships with your analyst community and the relationships with other folks. Right, which takes investment, right? And those are decisions that you have to make, how much investment do we make in PR? How much investment do we make in awareness? How much do we because if you ask them, it’s like put it on lead gen, hire more inside sales reps, right? So sometimes those are under appreciated. And there’s a science behind that where you can directly correlate what your demand gen conversion rates look like, based on your brand strength, the awareness, do I know you exist? Do they know what you stand for? All those kinds of things, influence demand, and that I don’t expect them to really appreciate that level of detail. There is a balance there that you have to strike.

Brian Neil: Yeah, yeah, I love the idea of the science behind it, too. I think that is, as a sales person, in my core DNA. We’re so like, just like “Give me, I need this.” We don’t think through the depth of things. I use the pharmaceutical world as an example here. Because there’s part of me that goes—and my sister in law is a high performing pharmaceutical rep—and she basically delivers Chick-fil-A to doctors offices for a living. And I’m thinking surely to god, this can’t be worth it. And when I talked to my friends at like Eli Lilly, or Merck, in the marketing side, they’re like, there’s so much science, behind the results that we get from delivering food to nurses, it works. When we don’t the scripts go down. So I think that’s really good. Carlos. And I would agree with you on that.

Carlos Carvajal: Great point. And that was the other part is just there’s also a lot of things around the programmatic side of marketing, the machinery behind marketing. I don’t expect like sales, salespeople got to sell, they’re busy. So I don’t really expect them to understand all that. But it is important as far as to how you optimize results, how you scale the organization and all those types of things.

Bill Caskey: I’ve got another question that’s off script here. What’s the meaning of life?

Brian Neil: This is the last time we’re ever taking over a marketing pocast. Marketing, people are so much more like prescriptive than salespeople are sometimes and thoughtful. And we’re just like all over the board. So. So tell us what is working? What’s working at Q2 right now. Between the relationship between marketing and sales, what’s working?

Carlos Carvajal: Yeah, I think the key there, what’s working—and it’s a journey right—is the relationship itself, right? And then that leads to everything else. So what I mean by that is, coming in right, I joined Q2 About two years ago. And very successful sales organization, like actually hitting their numbers doing really well without a lot of support from marketing from a demand generation. So that means change is hard. In that situation cuz like, it’s working like we’re doing things is great, right? So what I need are nice looking and PowerPoints, I need these things, etc, right? I can’t fault them. Right. So for worse, so establishing trust through the relationship building, and then everything that Peter and Sarah mentioned as far as as you go through that journey, and basically saying, what are the priorities, getting alignment on the priorities, reviewing results, and I couldn’t agree more on some of the comments earlier that you can’t just come in and start talking about looking at all these leads that we’re generating. At the end of the day, it’s about pipeline and bookings, and pipeline and bookings and pipeline bookings, and speak their language first. And then everything else is more of a means to an end around those two things. And just building that that kind of relationship and trust along the way. So with that, what we’ve done is we make sure that we have pretty close to alignment, there’s always some flex in there with the sales leadership team, and we go through plan review every quarter, and that could be from campaigns field and all these different things. So we make sure that we align on what we’re doing from a planning perspective. One of the things that the sales team did that was really helpful from a sales enablement perspective is they built out a sales center of excellence team, which didn’t exist years ago, and they partner with marketing on enablement. And it is so important to have somebody that’s in the sales organization that has those relationships as well, because they can lead into the organization and help a lot, right. So we partner and the primary partner, there is more around product marketing, especially around content, messaging, all those kinds of things that factor in with sales enablement. And then the next level down is okay, it’s great that we’re aligned on priorities, it’s great that we’re aligned on the goals, it’s great that we have a way to work with a sales center of excellence. But if you’re not aligned day to day with the individual sales reps, like forget about management, right, it’s been on the street. And that’s where the field marketers come in, right? The field marketers are the ones that are really tightly looped in from a communication perspective, and collaboration, perspective, feedback, cycles, all that kind of stuff. So just making sure we have all the different layers covered is really important. And that last loop is huge. Like just having that really tight connection with the reps, the individual reps, and appeal markers play a key role there.

Brian Neil: I’ve never heard of an idea like sales center of excellence and working directly with enablement. So what we tend to do, Bill and I do is we tend to steal ideas from other people, and go share them and get paid for them. Carlos, well, we always give credit. So thank you for that one. Everybody wins, exactly okay. But really, it’s great. But [ ] are really, really smart thing to do. I love that to maintain alignment.

Bill Caskey: So Carlos, we’re gonna send you to the green room, I want you to work on that question. And when we come back, we will be talking about it.

Brian Neil: Like a Monty Python movie or something.

Bill Caskey: It is Monty Python movie actually isn’t it ? The history of life.

So we’re gonna take a break. And thanks, Carlos. We’ll see you here in just a few minutes. And yeah, we’re supposed to talk about the Advanced Selling Podcast right now for a jif, Brian, what do you think of the Advances Selling?

Brian Neil: Let’s do it. So for those of you who don’t know, so this would be for all of our marketers listening, all of our salespeople. So Bill and I have been hosting the Advanced Selling Podcast, as Bill said earlier, for 17 years, we were one of the very, very first sales and business podcasts that ever existed. And we are the longest running for sure. Download wise, we’re pretty up there too. And people say, you know, how’d you do so well? I said, we just outlasted everybody, and just consistently kept producing the podcast every week. And it’s essentially a 15 to 20 minute show with a very moderate amount of humor at the beginning. And then typically a very, very tactical, or reasonably tactical sales bit of advice working on a real time problem. We have nearly 900 episodes, I think Bill?

Bill Caskey: Over that.

Brian Neil: Big big library, we have an app and go to Advanced Selling Podcasts or the App Store, get the app. So if you’re listening, you’re marketer, I would forward that app to all your sales team say, hey, these guys, these guys are okay. And they’re marketing friendly, marketing friendly. And then we got to talk about Insider a little bit.

Bill Caskey: Yeah, Insider is a special group of people who come together once a month for an hour and 15 minutes and I work with them. We do coaching on certain parts of the sales process, personal branding, the right questions to ask, how do you master the first call. Everything is sales oriented primarily for business to business, but or high end business to consumer. So that’s an insight that’s the Insider, you can find out more about that at advancedsellingpodcast.com/insider. There’s a QR code I think that Melissa has up there. So thank you for that. So it’s a highly engaged community and we both our LinkedIn community, we have about 11,000 people and also the insider program and our listeners. Our listeners are great. And so hopefully some of them are on now speaking of highly engaged communities. We’re going to bring in the show’s producer, Melissa.

Hey, Melissa. Tell us about CMO Huddles.

Melissa Caffrey: Hello. All right. We’re gonna turn your cameras off. You guys can go have your M&Ms. And let’s bring Sarah, Carlos, and Peter back in are three of our Huddlers and I’m going to do a little CMO Huddles plug since Drew’s not here. So here we go.

Launched in 2020 CMO Huddles is an exclusive community of over 100 highly effective B2B CMOs, who share, care, and very each other to greatness. One CMO described Huddles as a cross between an executive workshop and a therapy session. And given how hard things are getting out there who doesn’t need a little reassurance that they’re not alone? Everything about CMO Huddles is designed to be a force multiplier, helping you to make faster, better, and more informed decisions. Since no, CMO cannot work this crazy job CMO Huddles is here to help you outsmart it. If you’re a CMO who can share, care, and dare with the best of them, check out CMOhuddles.com. And since we have three Huddlers. Here, we wanted to ask you if you’re on the therapy side or the executive workshop side. And if you want to skip that question, we’ll go straight into if you guys have any examples of how CMO Huddles has helped you.

Peter Finter: Will definitely therapy side, I would say and I’ll specifically call out a time when I was between jobs and CMO Huddles offered the transition Huddle. That was really helpful. And not only was it helpful to me, but actually I was able to help a couple of other people in that there’s nothing quite like being in it together when you’re going through tough times. And I would say that’s really where CMO Huddles has shown up for me. And when I’m back in employment, being alongside of folks going through the same pains that I am—huge, huge, great ideas and great support.

Melissa Caffrey: Great, thanks, Peter.

Sara Larsen: Definitely therapy side for me as well. There’s real high trust factor amongst the group, a lot of sharing and low ego. So if you can find high trust factor, low ego, you can get a lot done, I enjoy the group and Drew does a great job.

Carlos Carvajal: Yeah, it’s been fantastic joining the meetings. I think we’re all facing very similar challenges at different points in time, sometimes common challenges that same point time. And one example that was around the great resignation, and a lot of the challenges around hiring and just crazy salaries and all these other things. And I actually was able to use some of the data points from the email summaries and things that were coming out with my HR team to justify some of the things that we needed to get done from a talent acquisition point of view, which was super helpful. So that was one, then one other thing, and I cannot remember the name of the person that shared it, just drawning a blank right now. So I apologize. But there was a quote that somebody used in one of the meetings around, “I want the experience for my team to be the best experience they ever have.” I want this to be the best marketing team that you’re ever part of. And you felt like that was a great experience. And I actually just used that with my team. And we have a program called “Be the Best Marketing Team,” which is more about the people right? How we take care of the people. And that was a direct idea from CMO Huddles, that came out. We’ve been using that now for over 18 months. And it’s been a huge help, actually.

Melissa Caffrey: Oh, that’s amazing. That’s great. All right, well, thank you all. I’m gonna hand the floor back over to Brian and Bill and you guys can get back to sales enablement.

Brian Neil: Come back a team. Everybody’s all full sugared up. Right. Okay, so we did before we get into the questions, we’re gonna ask the three of you as a panel, we did get one question—and Sarah, this is kind of a test, I’m just going to warn you—from a listener, someone that’s watching that just wanted to know, what specifically do you sell? What is your company?

Sara Larsen: Good question. So Walters Kluwer, they’re 180 year old publishing company that has made the pivot into information, services, and applications. And so we sell expert solutions to help professionals in a variety of fields. So I’m in Health Division. And so we help clinicians, providers, payers, PBMs, nursing, really anything in the health space with information and applications to help them do their jobs. We also support tax and accounting, GRC, legal and we have a new ESG division that we just launched. So expert solutions.

Brian Neil: Love it been around a minute. Balance time here, we’re balanced show everyone you know, gets to say their piece. So same question to the two of you. Peter, do you want to go next? What exactly do you all do?

Peter Finter: Yeah, Cyber GRX actually is the world’s leading provider of cybersecurity risk information. So we operate an exchange, it’s a two sided exchange, we have over 13,000 members who are sharing risk information to help improve supply chain integrity, and reduce overall risk to ecosystems, cybersecurity professionals used to worry all about what their employees were going to do to them. They still worry about that. But now they worry more about that third parties because two thirds of all of their breaches come through a business partner who has access that combination and networks, we exist to help everyone do a better job of solving that problem.

Brian Neil: Brilliant. And Carlos, same question.

Carlos Carvajal: So Q2 is a leader in digital banking solutions. So you can think about anything the consumer, an SMB client, or even at a corporation would need to do with a bank. That’s all gone digital. So basically what we do is we provide the software that powers all of that for them.

Brian Neil: Fantastic, coolest part about what Bill and I do is we get to learn all these businesses, like there’s even, it’s just fascinating, different ways that people can make a living these days. So okay, let’s get back to it marketing and sales, the lines are getting blurred somewhat, one of you mentioned I think maybe someone mentioned the idea of like BDRs/SDR roles are now under marketing. There’s this big debate. There’s a CMO in Indianapolis. His name is Kyle Lacey. A lot of CMOs know Kyle. So I’m gonna be friends with Kyle, Kyle said, “Brian, and want you to come talk to me.” This is five, six years ago. He’s like, “I’m thinking about taking SDR BDR into marketing. What do you think?” He just wanted some outside perspective? What do you all think? Is this a good thing or a bad thing that the lines are getting blurred between selling and marketing? Good or bad? Let’s start with Carlos.

Carlos Carvajal: I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. I think that, at the end of the day, one advantage of putting the BDRs with marketing is having just complete accountability of lead generation demand generation that can help with that. But I’ll also say I don’t think it should matter at the end of the day, right? If you have that relationship, you have shared goals, you understand what you’re trying to achieve, it should work in either model. Right is my take. But if it comes into marketing, then there is clear accountability on the demand gen side.

Brian Neil: Yeah. Sarah, thanks Carlos.

Sara Larsen: Right. So I think it’s a I think it’s a great question. But I would pose it more to what does a customer care about, right? They care about that everyone in their touchpoints has a consistent message that they know how to get value from the people they’re talking to, if your organization tends to be highly sales intensive, BDRs probably makes sense to be in the sales organization, if you tend to be very inbound driven and need to spend a lot of time upfront, qualifying and really helping to understand and educate the customer. BDRs probably makes sense in marketing. So I think it really depends on what you’re selling, where the customer journey is that and what makes the most sense for the customer interactions.

Brian Neil: Bravo, Peter, what about you?

Peter Finter: Just to broaden it back out to the lines between sales and marketing blurring, I think it’s not a good thing, if there’s a lack of clarity, if you’re not clear who’s on first, then you’re likely to drop the ball. And that’s not great. On the other hand, it is a good thing, if you can team effectively, and that teamwork needs to start from who is on your team. You know, I think often we think about our teams as our functional silos. But something that’s really helped me is to think about my peer group as my first team, and my functional team as my second team. Now, my own team members might not feel so good about that. But actually, it works. It works amazingly well, when mom and dad have a good relationship. Right? And, actually, we can make a difference there. I actually really appreciate the fact that we can look at situations identify what those issues and then decide who’s the right person to take it forwards from that. That’s a shared experience that we can deliver for our teams. And I think everybody gets along better when that happens.

Brian Neil: That’s brilliant.

Bill Caskey: Got some really good comments. So if you have a comment, make sure you make it and I’ll read a couple of these. Rosemary says when I ran Field Marketing a few jobs back the inside sales, which would be termed SDRs, reported directly to me really helped to crystallize the campaigns that drive results. So kind of echoing a little bit of what you guys said.

I’ve got a question on content, you know, sales, requests content. And however you define content, the marketing person or the marketing department usually responsible for coming up with it, and then they don’t use it. And so the question becomes—I know that’s not universal—But how do you look at content when it comes to a request from the sales team? Tell me a little bit about the role content plays in your, in your relationship with sales. Peter.

Peter Finter: Yeah, I would say that, first of all, content is an increasingly important part of what marketing is about. It’s probably always been that way. But now we’ve actually got a discipline around it, it’s started to raise its head a little bit more. But I think the way I think about content development is—there’s a difference between explicit needs and implicit needs. When a salesperson comes to you that telling you something that they see a need for, that’s an explicit need. If you’re a good marketer, you’re going to understand something about the implicit need. So when you say to me, I need this is that because what you’re hearing from your customer is X or you see a gap in the process, or we’re not able to explain something well, and you’re looking for some help. So I would say, do the work. Understand your buyer. Understand the personas in your ICP, understand the use cases, and build messaging and content that aligns with the jobs to be done. Because ultimately, we’re trying to help customers do things better, we often have to restrain their thinking. And then we have to show them why our solution matches the needs. If you can build that foundation. You’re going to have a much more fruitful conversation with your sellers about what’s going on. The second thing is, listen to what they hear. So go and do those joint calls. Review those call recordings. If you have your BDR team. Find out what happens in real life, not just in your head. Marketers love to live in their heads, get them into the real world definitely helps them with the content they deliver.

Bill Caskey: That’s awesome. Sara or Carlos, would you like to weigh in on this question?

Sara Larsen: Sure. You know, I have this belief that in marketing content is our product, the outcome is going to be pipeline and revenue. But we create content. That is really what marketers do. And you have to think of content creation, like you would creating a product. So someone’s coming to you and asking you for a product. And 50-60% of the time when you give it to them, they’re not using it, you have to look at why is there not a product market fit here for your product. And so, as marketers, we have to apply the discipline that we have in product marketing to really get underneath. What’s the question behind the question of why the sales need this content, what’s it looking to address and then measure, you gotta measure the effectiveness of your products. So I play that product marketing discipline, to thinking about, you know, content.

Bill Caskey: Carlos got anything on this?

Carlos Carvajal: Yeah thos both, they’re great points fror Peter and Sara, I’ll just add a couple of things. It’s funny Bill, when you ask the question—this is a hard challenge at every company I’ve ever been at, right when they say how do you actually get people to use the content? Etc. Right? So back to that sales center of excellence, yes, is has helped with that a lot. Because we make sure we we get them involved in the process when we aligned with the sales team as far as what are we going to deliver? Because part of it is writing the content, aligning with the buyer aligning with the needs getting all the subject matter experts involved. But you need to have an enablement plan, once you build the content, what are we doing to actually to roll it out? Do we have a plan around that? And then how do we know any of it sticking? Are we actually going to train on some of the knowledge capture and things like that. So just making sure that you go beyond producing the content and think about the full enablement plan behind it. And if you can’t get alignment on that, it’s not really going to work.

Brian Neil: That’s really good. And I’m not going to I’m not going to admit in a public forum like this, that I may have destroyed 4000 pounds of marketing collateral when I left Procter and Gamble, that these marketing people with much smarter than I spent years and years compiling, I’m not going to admit that I did that. But I’m guilty. Okay, let’s stay on the topic of sales enablement. So let’s talk about what makes a successful sales enablement program that plays well with marketing, what are some good things? And how do you prioritize the sales enablement function and their priorities and their initiatives with your own? And I know Carlos, you already gave us a little color on thing that you did was really good. So I’m gonna start with Sara, what are some good sales enablement, tips or ways to work well, on the sales enablement, marketing front Sara?

Sara Larsen: Yeah, well, I think there’s probably two things. You know, one, I think marketing plays a key role in driving that red thread of messaging into and through sales enablement. You have to bring that into whatever methodology your sales team is using, but stay consistent with the message for your customers, think about who’s on the buying committee, who’s the influencer? What are their care about? What’s their pain? And then the second that I’ve learned painfully, as I’ve gotten more deeply involved in value enablement is if there’s no pain, there’s no change. So you really need to understand where are the sales teams having pain today, that’s where to target your sales enablement. And it might be different team by team. There’s no one size fits all. So really zero in on the pain of where your sales teams are struggling. And that’s where you should spend time on sales enablement.

Brian Neil: That’s great. What a great perspective you’re treating your sales team like your customer. I just love that. Yeah, Peter, what’s your take on this one?

Peter Finter: I’m gonna say. Yeah, from my perspective, I would say that marketing is always storytelling, right? Our job as storytellers is to tell the story about brand and to engage our prospects appropriately, through marketing channels, the alignment of that message and the way we tell a story to the way that salespeople tell that same story, face to face in front of that prospect digitally or in person these days. That is a critical opportunity, I think, for sales and marketing to partner together to deliver that. So whether that’s your first meeting pitch deck, which is never actually used, but the story is what matters and what you want the salesperson to remember the customers success stories and the key nuggets, whether it’s that or it’s a new hire bootcamp, and actually the roleplay that goes on in that how much you bring it to life and make that work and have marketing deeply involved in. And then I would just go back to my point about personas and market segmentation. Every time that you decide to look at your market differently, ensure that you have sales in the core team right at the very beginning. Because ultimately, the most important thing about enablement is adoption. We can create all the best things in the world. And if nobody cares to use it, it’s a waste of our time. So start with the end in mind, if you want to adopt it, have sales involved from the get go.

Bill Caskey: I really liked that idea. I was I’ve got a client who I’m working with I just started working with about a month ago and one of my assignments was we need to get better at the story, the story of how the company began, what kind of resilience had to occur for the company to be prosperous today, and I asked each of the people—there was 11 people on the call—tell me about the story of this company, tell me about how it started. And the president of the company was on the phone on the call, too. And there was stone silence from these 10 people. Stone silence. And the President spoke up and said, “I am appalled, I am appalled that you do not know how this company started, and what we’ve been through to get to this point. And I’m also appalled at why you can’t tell that story. Because if you can’t tell that story, how is the customer really going to see themselves in that storY if you’re not telling it?” And I thought that was—So when you said story, we hear a lot about story. Everybody’s talking about story. But I’m not sure how good the sales team is at telling the stories of these companies. And I’m not sure how good the marketing teams generally are infusing them with what that story is. I really liked that, Peter.

Brian Neil: Bravo. So let’s go to—we’ll go like kind of a speed round here. This is all about the outcome in the end, because we’re all in business. And we know the environment we’re in, especially on the technology side of the world these days. Let’s just talk KPI and measurement. So how do we measure impact marketing efforts on sales enablement of our revenue? How do you measure impact? Give us a KPI or two, two or three word phrase there, Peter.

Peter Finter: I would say quality pipeline is the single most important factor for me. Ultimately, our job is equipping sellers to be able to identify and create real opportunities that they can close. That’s it.

Brian Neil: Well love it. I love it. Carlos.

Carlos Carvajal: Pipeline pipeline pipeline. Love it.

Brian Neil: Three pipelines, pipeline cubed. Sara.

Sara Larsen: I’m gonna say win rates and faster deal cycles.

Brian Neil: Love it. You’re speaking to salespeople, when you say those all three of you are like I’m a salesperson. Like yes, yes, and yes. Thank you. You know what it tells me, I’m gonne get a little soft here, you get me, you get me. Thank you.

Bill Caskey: We’ve got about three minutes left here. And we really appreciate Peter, Sara, and Carlos joining us today. And thanks for Drew and the team at Renegade for asking us to be on. I want to finish with just some words of wisdom based on the future of sales enablement. You can go sales enablement, you can go marketing, you can go marketing sales, but what is the trend—from your standpoint—that is happening that we need to be paying attention to in this whole conversation? So I will start with well, actually, I’ll let you guys decide who who wants to begin, who’s got the courage to step up and say.

Sara Larsen: I’ll jump in. I think CMOs are going to be called on more and more to drive value enablement, I say value enablement, because it’s about the communication of value across the lifecycle of a deal. And so very practically, I’d say if you’re in the marketing, leadership roles, learn sales methodologies understand how sales selling today and figure out how can you bring more value and value messaging into those methodologies and approaches.

Bill Caskey: So awesome. Love Peter, Carlos?

Peter Finter: I will say generative AI and I told you to chatGPT should be part of the podcast, I think it is a new world as sales and marketing people because we talk about smart people. Well, now we have smart machines. They’re not that smart yet, but they’re getting smarter every day. And the reality is, they can transform our world. And we better figure out how to do it and where to apply it. What does that really mean for us? I recommend starting with your messaging, and your email marketing give it a chance and you’ll be amazed at how apparently smart it appears to be. So how do we take advantage of that I would also say competitive intelligence is another area where we can leverage technology like AI much more effectively. But it needs to be consumable for your reps, if you’re going to overwhelm them with new sources of data, it’s going to be unused. So let’s be thoughtful about it. That’s something we all got to get our arms around.

Bill Caskey: Awesome. Carlos finish it off here for us.

Carlos Carvajal: Yeah, I was gonna mention something similar. But I think part of the challenge with with adoption and just use of things is just making it easy, like how do you make it easy to find what somebody is looking for. And that is a big challenge. And that’s where I say, AI and other technology can come into play, you know, either message or chatGPT. Because I think the easier you can make it for somebody to find, I need a piece of content that’s going to help me with this type of deal against this competitor, etc, right? And we’re actually experimenting with that now. We’re actually putting that into our systems where people can just type in a phrase, and then it comes up with recommendations on the things that would be most helpful. And that has been a big hit.

Brian Neil: Awesome. That’s good. I’ll say one thing you take us out, Bill, I just want to say thank you first to all of you and just know this, we respect what you do more than we ever say. I promise you, the salespeople love you and respect you. They just don’t know how to express it sometimes. So thank you so much.

Bill Caskey: They’re all bottled up. Feelings are all bottled up inside. Thank you. Thank you to Sarah, Carlos, Peter. Thanks for the audience, too. We love you guys. And if you want to check out the Advanced Selling Podcast, we’d love to have you there. Drew will be finishing his vacation. He’s probably on his way back right now. If you’re hearing us, we thank you all for listening and watching, and thanks to our guests.

Drew Neisser: To hear more conversations like this one and submit your own questions while we’re live. Join us on the next CMO Huddle Studio. We stream to my LinkedIn profile that’s Drew Neisser. Every other week.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and our B2B podcast partners Share Your Genius. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!