Moving on to our episode today…
Recently, we have been talking more about the idea of sales and marketing which is rapidly changing. Today’s guest, Jeffrey Davis talks about how you can recognize how sales and marketing can work together and do phenomenal things. He shares metrics you need to focus on and some great insight into account-based management and startups.
Jeffrey is the Founder of the Sales and Marketing Alignment Summit, an event where they bring together sales, marketing, and sales enablement in B2B technologies to have a conversation about the challenges they have working together and how to alleviate those and move forward.
Here are the highlights of my conversation with Jeffrey:
The goals of the Sales and Marketing Alignment Summit:
- To create a community of sales and marketing professionals focused on growth through better alignment
- To find and curate the best content
- Facilitating collaboration between business owners to facilitate alignment between these groups
Factors behind the tension between sales and marketing:
- Not data-driven
Many companies look at metrics but are not data-driven. You can generate a healthy revenue and not realize you’re losing money because of missed opportunities.
- Leadership aspect
If you have a person that comes from sales, you tend to have a sales-driven organization. If you have somebody that comes from marketing, you tend to have a marketing-driven organization. Because the skill set is very different, it’s difficult to balance the two unless you have an executive team that has experience from both sides.
Sell to Sales!
Sell ideas, concepts, and strategies to sales people.
Communicate with sales the reason you’re doing this, why they should care, and how is it going to help them reach their revenue goals and make money.
All organizations should be sales-driven and it’s up to leadership to sell the unique attributes that marketing brings to them and how it can make their life easier so they can close more businesses.
Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing is an essential component to overall high level strategies which can fall into three buckets:
- Take a system approach (versus a functional approach).
Instead of looking at sales as sales and marketing as marketing, look at it from the viewpoint of the customer. Start talking about customer journeys and look at it holistically as to how best engage potential customer so you get the outcome you want.
- Have a formal feedback loop.
Build, measure, learn. Have that continuous conversation between the two so that marketing can iterate strategies and put the best out there for the market.
- Focus on shared goals.
In a lot of sales organizations, sales and marketing don’t have the same goals. Regardless of sales or marketing, your primary metric should be, are you hitting revenue? If not, why not?
Metrics you should pay attention to:
- Are you reaching your target revenue?
- Correlate to the sales funnel (ex. marketing qualified leads, total lead volume)
- Middle of the funnel (ex. servicing metrics around service line agreements)
- Close metrics (ex. close ratio)
- Find out where majority of revenue is coming from to help you understand where you need to share or push your resources.
More strategies to bridge the gap between sales and marketing:
- Raise the conversation from tactical B2B technology to fundamentally changing the way sales and marketing see themselves and the way they interact.
- Move them from being independent warriors to really seeing each other as allies and a source of strength.
- Convince salespeople that marketing is an asset to them and can help them do their job easier.
- Change the goals in your conversations into:
“How does what you’re doing today affect your colleague?”
“How can you move toward collectively attaining more revenue?”
Sales and marketing in startups:
In startups, you become both sales and marketing.
You have to learn two completely different disciplines and understand when to apply which. It depends on where your customer is throughout their customer journey.
You have to morph back and forth between two things that are fundamentally different in their objective.
Information: Your Competitive Advantage
- People
- Process
- Products
Get information on these three and it will keep you ahead.
Jeffrey’s Major Takeaway:
Revenue fixes all problems. At the end of the day, focus on revenue and it will tell you the story and what you need to do.
Episode Resources:
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Connect with Jeffrey on Twitter @jeff_davis2 and check out his blog at www.jeffdavis2.com. Learn more about the Sales and Marketing Alignment Summit at www.smasummit.com. They’re currently exclusively in Chicago but they wish to expand to other major cities throughout the country. Feel free to reach out to him if you’re interested to partner with him.
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