The main source of conflict between sales and marketing often stems from the perception among salespeople that the sole responsibility of marketing is to support sales efforts. Whether you agree or disagree, what if this perspective is accurate? As marketers, it’s essential for us to drop our egos every once and awhile, and look at ourselves in the mirror. Whether it’s crafting engaging campaigns, refining branding, or unleashing creativity, we need to ask ourselves: What is the ultimate goal beyond just “selling more”? This week’s episode features Scott Logan, SVP of Marketing and Demand Generation at Connex One. We will delve into the intricacies of marketing strategy for sales-oriented organizations, covering aspects such as team alignment, marketing operations, and measurement. It’s an episode you don’t want to miss!
Podcast Transcript
You’re listening to the Digital Banter Podcast, the show where we tackle the challenges of B2B marketing head on and aren’t afraid to tell it like it is. Join us weekly as we talk to industry leaders, explore opportunities that impact the bottom line, and rev your company’s marketing engine with actionable insights and tips.
It’s time to burn the old B2B playbook and build something that makes an impact. Here are your hosts, Andy and James.
What’s up everybody. Welcome back to another episode of digital banter. Apparently I am doing today’s intro because James has PTSD off of last episode and how that went. So I’m back in charge when it comes to that. And I am thrilled to welcome Scott Logan to the show. Scott, welcome aboard, man. Hello.
Thanks for having me. Yeah. So Scott, you’re SVP of marketing demand [00:01:00] gen over at connects one, right? Yep. New role this year. Well, last year, I guess. Right. Exactly. So I know kind of James and you talked, uh, leading into this, I was unable to join. And. To give our audience some background as far as like our process is concerned.
So typically you meet guests, you know, figure out what we’re going to talk about. And then James kind of does his thing as far as creating a title, a description, things like that. And to, through his own admission, he went a little click baity on today’s episode to try and kind of rile up, hopefully our audience around, you know, what marketing’s job is in the ecosystem.
You know, James, I’ll kind of turn it over to you because of, of kind of your background in developing that before we kind of start talking through today’s topic. Yeah. So Scott, I know we talked about this a little bit, but Laura is actually who suggested that I bring you on as a guest. And if anybody knows who.
If anybody knows Laura Durham, she’s like [00:02:00] big on marketing sales alignment. And she, I guess, spoke to you at a conference for awhile. You guys put, actually put out quite a bit of content together. Um, so that’s kind of, we met in a group too, very briefly, but she said, you got to have this guy on. And then after talking to you, I think one of the things that you said that really stuck out to me and is like kind of.
pretty controversial is that you essentially said marketing exists to support sales and that was the hill that you would die on. And coming from Laura, who’s all about, you know, marketing sales alignment, shared goals, like all that stuff. Um, I thought, and. I don’t know her most recent brand stun as far as like buying that billboard in, uh, whatever, and their lack of ability to measurement.
I found it interesting. So I guess from the first question I have from you is like, okay, that’s your hill to die on. And I need some more details on why that’s where you stand. Yeah. [00:03:00] So, uh, just for some context, uh, I started out in sales doing like in person type sales stuff while I was in college. And then, uh, moving into a corporate sales role.
And from there, uh, went into marketing around a way in the marketing operations side of things, but they didn’t have a, uh, demand, uh, SDR function. And so they actually, and this is a United health group. They’re creating a team that had this crazy idea of let’s do demand gen. We heard about this and we think it can be good for even.
As big a company as United Health Group is on the software side. So, uh, they didn’t have anyone to qualify like webinar leads. So they said, Oh, well, these guys and gals are tied to their desks. So let’s just hook them up to an Avaya switch and they can take the calls. And so I’m starting out, uh, marketing operations also being an [00:04:00] SDR at the same time, answering emails, connected to a phone switch, scheduling, bathroom breaks, all that type of thing.
To make sure we have coverage as we’re building out automation workflows and, you know, managing spreadsheet cleanup and stuff like that. So my whole world has been sales focused marketing from the beginning, not like an agency background. And, uh, that’s kind of where my origins of my career started and it’s just.
Always, uh, seemingly a thing that I become more successful. The more I aligned the sales. So I’m going to ask a question right off. Cause I feel like this is a controversial thing that people talk about. You mentioned being an SDR that are kind of having this hybrid SDR role. A lot of people talk about, does that SDR role fall under marketing or does it fall under sales?
I think it should be. What makes the most sense for the business. So [00:05:00] if you have a very heavy, cold outbound motion and that works for your business and you found success there, but now you have a demand gen engine and team that’s driving a lot of inbound, uh, it. Might make sense to split the teams, and it might make sense to put the inbound team under marketing because you can coordinate faster.
You can coordinate better priorities of workflow and workload. Uh, there’s less conflicts, but. If it’s, you know, a blended environment where you have inbound and outbound with the same SDR team, it probably makes more sense to have those roll up to, uh, sales, but with a dotted line to the demand gen leader so that you still have a stake in the.
Prioritization of what’s going on, how to spiff for or promote or have, [00:06:00] you know, contest for the SDRs to really boost up the results. You’re driving from the campaigns because you get a bunch of campaigns going. All of a sudden, they don’t know what to follow up on. And so, as long as I’m connected to the.
Uh, leader of the SDR team on a daily basis. And I’m using the, that leadership to plan my campaigns, uh, and strategize with, then I’m fine with the rolling up the sales. So how often should marketing and sales be meeting? I mean, I know you just kind of alluded to daily, but let’s dive into that a little bit more as far as like who should be meeting, how is more importantly, then how is that information disseminated across stakeholders and team members?
Yeah, yeah. So with the BDR and SDR team, I take an extreme measure because I sat in that seat. I sat in the bag holder seat, uh, carrying a quota. And I know how important it is for me to, uh, as a sales rep know what’s going on and know how I can take advantage of this work that’s [00:07:00] being done. And so, as a marketing leader, I need to make sure that.
They feel comfortable and confident in driving pipeline through the initiatives from the marketing team. So I even go as far as saying, uh, in one job, we actually moved the demand gen team to the bullpen that was next to the SDR bullpen. And I have a saying, and anyone who’s worked on any of my teams, uh, knows this.
You could probably recite it for me. Uh, but since you guys haven’t been there. I say, 50 percent of your time should be sent spent with sales. So it’s talking to the SDRs being in their meetings, uh, planning with them, even listening to call recordings, uh, counts as that time spent because if. We’re providing talk tracks and email templates and things like that.
We need to know what sticks and what works and what drives a quality [00:08:00] discussion. We should also be running role plays where we’re in the hot seat and they get to be. The buyer in those role plays. And first I run marketing through it and I say, okay, be the most stubborn buyer or the most common objection person that you, uh, face.
And I’m going to run you through the talk track we built for you and we’ll see if it works and if it doesn’t work. Well, then we’ll change it right here. Got my laptop. Let’s make something that actually drives the right discussion. And then you can find out, Oh, well, do they just need to be trained a little bit differently on how to handle the discussion or are they doing a great job?
But we’re driving them down a path that buyers don’t care about. So we want to make sure that we’re totally aligned and connected there. On the AE side, the sales rep side, you should weekly basis. I do probably. Minimum 2 meetings with my sales VPs or sales directors, however you’re set up and then, uh, [00:09:00] I spend, uh, as much time as I can with the actual reps themselves.
It’s a little harder in the remote setting, uh, but you want to get feedback from them have open communication. The last component of it is the planning don’t, I don’t like planning in a bubble. I want sales to be as invested in my marketing plan as I am invested in the marketing plan. So when we have our QBRs, when we have our marketing off sites, I bring in the sales leaders.
For different sections of it, even in the brainstorming section. Hey, we’re going after this product is pushing these, these new solutions, or we want to drive revenue for this bucket of solutions. So, uh, here’s what we want to do for, uh, you know. Having you hit your quota, because I, I always say things in terms of the sales reps and I speak to sales reps, I say, I want to get you to president’s club.
That’s my goal. I want you to hit your quota and your O. T. E. [00:10:00] How can I help you do that? Here’s what we need to do. Here’s our tools and resources. Let’s work together. Now, when that stuff comes down the pipe to them, they’re like, oh, yeah, I had an idea for that. Or, oh, yeah, I now know what it is that we’re doing at that show or whatever it is.
So, uh, you just want to make sure that there’s, uh, one go to market team, one go to market initiative, and you’re working together the entire way. Otherwise you’re just throwing stuff over the fence and you just hope that the right attention gets drawn to it. And that’s really a bad strategy in my mind.
So Scott, we had a question come through from Dennis Nostra, Nostro, sorry. Uh, around, is this only applicable to B2B or is this has kind of universal? Towards other kind of business models and business types. Yeah. So B2C, if you’re B2C and you’re mostly e commerce, then obviously there’s no sales team. So you are the sales team.
In my mind, you need to be looking at. [00:11:00] Close rates conversions. You need to look at the stages of your funnel. Uh, and it’s not a traditional B2B sales rep funnel. It’s a process in the order process funnel. So in my last company, we created a product led growth self service purchase model. We looked at every step.
Are they? Getting to the landing page to sign up. Are they, or maybe are they putting things in the cart to buy? Are they then buying everything in the cart? What’s the timeframe in which things stay in a cart? Uh, is it easy to purchase? Do you have the right payment mechanisms? Maybe people want Apple pay because they can just double click and do a face recognition for a purchase.
Do you have that if the purchase isn’t getting made, but the cart’s getting filled, it’s just looking at it. Through the lens of whatever your sales cycle is and aligning to that to make sure it’s as streamlined as possible, whether you’re working with a team of reps or you’re working with an e commerce situation, I think [00:12:00] that answers the question.
All right. So I got a follow up question to this, that I, there’s something that I think about quite often and you coming specifically, this is more focused on the demand gen side of things. How much of your. Demand gen strategy is dependent on the structure of your sales team. I’ll give an example, right?
So a small startup may have three salespeople and probably, I don’t know. I always think of like, can they handle, they probably can’t handle the lead gen waterfall. Strategy because there’s only three of them. They’re going to get too many leads are following up. They’re going to waste their time on a lot of stuff versus an enterprise motion that has 100 salespeople.
Right? They probably need more leads and are grasping at anybody that they can reach out to. That’s shown any form of intent. So my question to you is like, how would you structure your strategy differently based on some of the different sales structures that you’ve seen? Yep. So if I have a [00:13:00] handful of reps, I’m not just working with the sales leaders, primarily, I’m working with all of them together.
If one sales leader, three reps in your scenario, that’s easy group of people to manage. You probably have a team of you or you plus one. So together say, hey, we’re going to be pushing leads down. What are the leads that are actually converting lead to meeting, meeting to opportunity, and then how is that opportunity flowing?
And so you need to be aligned to whatever the sales flow is for you. Then if you only have a small team, you don’t want to go out and say, all right, we’re going to do. Content syndication, or we get all these downloads of content and these different channels go follow up. Well, that’s going to be an utter waste of time for everybody.
So maybe in that case, you just remove all forms, but leave mechanisms along the way where you can identify which companies are [00:14:00] actually. Downloading and then that crew that creates your target list for you, because then you’re seeing, oh, we have all these downloads. Here’s some accounts. We should go after.
Let’s put them into more of an ABM workflow to get them to close as fast as possible. And if you have a larger enterprise team. Maybe your SDR team is 20 people, 30 people, whatever it is, uh, you can judge, well, maybe we get a bunch of case study demos. Maybe the pricing page gets a bunch of hits. Let’s put some of the SDRs on live chat on the pricing page to intercept live traffic and chat with them proactively.
Maybe case studies. Uh, have enough lead flow where you can actually put a gate there. If it doesn’t drop conversion rates, I would like to not have a gate there, but I get it. Some companies still thrive and do well off of that. So make it as small a form as possible and then follow up on those. Um, I always like to have on get it as much as possible, though, in talking [00:15:00] to a lot of companies and CMOs at big enterprises, it’s really not an issue.
They’re going to buy. They’re going to fill the form. They need the case study because they need to build a business case. So you’re going to get those leads, and it’s not that much of a friction point, especially if you have a well known brand. So it just depends on removing the friction and using that data to supply your sales team with what it is they need.
If they need a lot of volume, what’s the most quality volume that you can provide? And then ungate the rest. If it’s more strategic, like a three person team, Let’s still put out a bunch of stuff to create that awareness, create that traction and use that to identify who you should go after. Even in the B2C world, you get a bunch of clicks from, uh, you know, say you sell, uh, something for, for the home and you find out that there’s an area where.
You get a lot of traffic on a persona [00:16:00] that buys a lot of home goods. Well, are they buying or are they not? And if they are giving you traction, you need to increase conversion rates. Well, how can you address that audience that you’re getting traction with better? To put that in the hands of whatever your sales mechanism is.
So Scott, I want to go back to kind of some of the things you were talking about before, uh, by spending 50 percent of your time with sales as kind of a rule of thumb that you live by. I’m curious, like for our listeners, what are three of the most valuable questions and or insights that you can get out of that time spent?
Cause I can imagine you could do, you know, 50 million things, but what are like the three most valuable things that you can take out of those, out of that time spent together? Yep. Number one, I’m going to first use that as a, as the highest priority. It’s not necessarily a question. It’s more of a state of mind on how you want your sales team to look at [00:17:00] your marketing team.
I go in and I say, listen, I don’t want to come in here. I came here to one of your meetings and have everyone smile and nod and say, Hey, that’s great. And then move on. You might think, Hey, they loved it. That’s awesome. They were all like high fiving thumbs up being on the zoom and whatever, but there’s no way every marketing campaign is amazing.
There’s just not the case. So I say, listen, if I come in here for a post campaign call or for a check in I want to hear you bitch and complain about whatever. I want to hear your, Your objections and what you’re seeing. If I come in here and it’s just a bunch of high fives, but there’s not the five X in revenue from it, then you probably have to work on something.
And I want to make your world easy. So tell me what’s wrong with everything. Sure. Tell us what’s working. That’s great. But I want to know exactly what it is that is causing you pain. When we do this [00:18:00] stuff so that I can make better corrections for our team’s efforts to help you more. So, please give me your kind and constructive and candid.
Conversational points on how we should make things better and we’re not going to take it personally. Because not everything is going to work just like every call you’re on. It doesn’t turn into a sale. So establish that and then I always like to, like I said before, say, I’m here to help you hit quota.
I’m here to help you get the president’s club. I’m here to make you win. Uh, and setting that tone is the most important thing in my mind. Once you have that open communication going back and forth, that’s when you can say, okay, what are your goals? And I’m going to back out of your goals. Uh, like, I’ll take, for instance, the extreme example on the mega enterprise size side.
[00:19:00] We had a partnership at a past company where we were 1 of the top partners for Microsoft teams. We sold a solution for contact centers running on teams. Well, what we found out was. They don’t give a shit about, oh, that’s cool. Thumbs up. They don’t care about your contact center solution. What we found out is no matter what they sell, they have quarter retirement goals off of Azure licenses.
How much data can they get on Azure from Google, from Amazon? How much of that can we push over into Microsoft’s cloud? And so we thought, oh, okay. That’s interesting. We then highlighted to them all these wins where we moved someone off of an Amazon. Backed solution that they were using today and moved it to Azure and then told them how much data the contact center provides into the cloud.
So it’s not like, oh, a [00:20:00] few numbers. No, we’re talking about telephony call recordings, video recordings. This is a massive amount of data that you can sell. Oh, okay. That makes sense to me. Do the same thing with your team, find out how you can align to their goal and back out of it. And then say, what is the volume and capacity?
Like you talked about earlier, James, you know, are you so bogged down with massive pipeline? I hope this is the case, but you just have so many deals to close and you’re closing them at a good rate that you only have time for a few things. So now I’m going to go more abm focused and go more awareness on some of my stuff.
If they’re like pipeline is important. Yeah. Dad, we building this marketing team from scratch. We need volume. Like you wouldn’t believe. Okay. I’m not going to give you a bunch of white paper downloads, but I’m going to deploy tactics that have moderate volume of quality stuff because they just care about what converts and what closes.
I don’t want an MQL goal. Maybe I want a meeting goal [00:21:00] where I’m tracking the conversion rates of those meetings. Uh, and so it’s a matter of what is the tactic that’s going to get you there and let’s strategize around that. So those would be the three things. So to what degree do you have? To what degree should sales be involved in content ideation and creation?
Nothing. They’re stupid.
Um, certainly take their advice. If you have a bigger organization, you’re going to have a product marketing team and a content team that needs that feedback. And so often you need to be as the marketing team, especially the demand gen function, the connective fabric between. Those two teams, the Milton from office space, I talked to the customers because they don’t talk to the technical people like be that guy.
And so when you’re that guy, you provide the channel to give that feedback in a structured way, in a way that they can [00:22:00] actually do something with, because your mind is set on how can we increase sales, but then how can we adapt the content in a way where. We don’t make every single product sheet a straight, hard pitch, right?
Have use cases in there, have example stats in there. Uh, they’re probably not thinking of some of the things that are needed to sell. They’re thinking, how can we highlight the product the best? And there’s a really good blend of engagement that, um, you can come to a conclusion on. Even pull some of them into the meetings so that they can hear on the, on the content side, on the product marketing side.
What the sales reps are saying, so they get a glimpse into that world and they start to do that naturally on their own. Yeah. And that was one of the things that kind of raised a flag for me, like internally, as you were talking before about like wanting to have sales invested in like campaign creation and things like that.
And it’s like, to what degree do you want investment versus to what degree does there eventually become [00:23:00] derailment and obstacles to actually moving forward because of too many cooks in the kitchen, too many ideas, too many cheer point before, when it comes to like content, like how many. Too much of a focus on hard sell because that’s what drives the needle versus like what is actually needed for the buyer at that stage of the journey.
Yeah, if you don’t have that open communication and you haven’t established that this is a safe place to complain about stuff, then there’s just going to be a whole lot of after the meeting’s done complaining on both sides. Everyone has the goal of doing well in your job and increasing revenue for the company.
So find out where that common purpose is, understand each other’s worlds and what each other are going through, uh, to the extent of even if you have a, a e commerce or a, a PLG product like growth model, then. And the product led growth model, bring in the engineers. The last place when we built that, uh, PLG model, I actually had [00:24:00] the lead engineers in those meetings.
So they could see and hear the feedback from the, uh, from the team on. What’s happening in the sales funnel when it’s hands off and all self serve because they’re building stuff that they think is going to be good, but what I’ve often found and, you know, not open, candid, kind conversation, they want to work on the cool, amazing, like blow your mind stuff.
But for a sales cycle, maybe the biggest hurdle is that you have to sign in with Google here, and then you have to sign in and validate Google again. How can we just make it one click instead of two, three click processes? 10 minutes of work. I’m doing some cool stuff over here. Yes. But that 10 minutes of work, pat yourself on the back after you get that done, because we’re going to increase conversion rates by three, four, five or more percent.
And we’re going to have a lot [00:25:00] less stress on this whole thing. So it kind of sounds to me like key part of marketing’s role is kind of holding other people accountable at the same time where, you know, I think. In kind of the clickbait headline stuff, it made it sound like, okay, like sales is going to say like, Hey, I need this.
I need this. I need this. I need this. Right. And then you also have the same thing on the product side where they’re like, Hey, I need this, like in the PLG model and. Marketing is keeping it consistent, right? They’re almost like the police between the two. Do you have any like examples where you’ve kind of had like marketing, I don’t know, put their foot down on something on the sales side and, you know, create that consistency.
Yeah. Um, I will, in one of my. First marketing manager jobs after I got out of, uh, marketing operations, uh, [00:26:00] took the gig. It was the first like demand gen person on the team of like the contributor. And, uh, we go into a sales meeting in my first week and my boss says, uh, she goes, okay, we’ve been called and nicknamed.
The sales prevention department, we have to change that. So she even put up signs in around our bullpen area in the offices, obviously pre pandemic, like 10 years ago, uh, where it said had actual LinkedIn pictures of sales reps. And it said, are you doing something that will help the sales team? Or what are you doing?
Or is your work helping sales? And it had their faces on it. And so it was just. Sending a signal to them that we care about you and what we’re doing is for you. And it sends a message to us, say, are you working on something that like in the engineering [00:27:00] scenario is cool, or are you working on something that’s actually going to convert into revenue?
Cause what’s cool. Doesn’t always convert to revenue. I miss that stuff, but I mean, Andy and I are in the office. And when you have the culture. Everybody together, even if you’re doing stuff like that. So that is awesome. So if you want to talk about like Laura’s thing with the billboard, it kind of translates into that.
Yeah. A billboard in times square. You see it all the time, like the NASDAQ, blah, blah, blah. Their CEO’s faces on the billboard. That’s so cool. Creates so much awareness. Marketing team high five. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is great. And then sales is like, what the hell are you doing? It doesn’t help my pipeline.
This is ridiculous. But. When you get into the weeds of it, you find out what Laura’s strategy actually was. And this is one of our conversations that we had [00:28:00] at that conference in New York was, all right, tell me the philosophy behind it. Cause she kind of went rogue on that cause it was a surprise to the CEO and all that.
Well, there’s a few factors there. One, we were at a conference. Right next to time square and at this conference was gobs of marketing and sales leaders from their target audience or their target segment. Number 2, she’s has a great following and she has a lot of people who aren’t at that conference that do follow her content and like to see.
Fun, engaging, entertaining things. It was a very fun and entertaining thing. The look of shock on the C on the CEO’s face, that type of thing. And, uh, it actually created a huge amount of buzz. How many times does your booth create a huge amount of buzz [00:29:00] with your best reps working? It doesn’t create any buzz, but maybe you get better booth conversions.
How about if everybody at the show is talking about dream data and what they did on time square? And did you see the video of the CEO? Who’s there at the show? You can go up and talk to him. About that billboard. Well, guess who gets more booth traffic? Guess who comes up to Laura during the conference and saying, Hey, I’ve seen your stuff, but I haven’t really talked about dream data.
We’re, you know, evaluating data solutions in the next year. Let’s let’s chat. Well, now you’ve done something that is strategically aligned to boosting pipeline from that show, and you’ve created awareness awareness. And you’ve created a content from the show that expands far beyond the show itself. So now you’ve [00:30:00] taken like a 1x, 1x, 2x to like a 5 to 10x in comparison to, uh, you know, your standard trade show motion versus that.
And then I said, all right, that sounds amazing. But the cost of that is going to kill your ROI on this. And she goes, guess how much that costs? And she told me how many times it was showing for how many days. And I go, I don’t know, 10 grand. Because a booth at a small show like that is like 10 to 15 grand.
500 dollars. She told me that too. Crazy. 500 bucks. The dinner I hosted was more than 500 bucks and that’s for 10 people. So when you look at all that stuff and you bring the sales team in on that and they hear the plan and they hear the strategy. Now it’s not just marketing saying Times Square billboard.
You have the sales team [00:31:00] saying, Times Square billboard, and then they post it all over the place instead of being all bitter and not talking about it because they know it was a minimal cost for more exposure to get more leads that they’re going to follow up on after the show. So there goes back to that communication and being that connective tissue between marketing initiatives.
And the sales. All right. So we hang on, we got, I got one big thing that I feel like we can’t talk, can’t not talk about when you have this conversation and that’s the old credit dispute. So you, when we talked leading up to this, you showed me some. Intense reporting dashboards. I don’t say intense, nothing I haven’t seen before, but you definitely had a system in place for how you kind of measure and assign credit.
So one, I want to get your view on credit. And then I want to follow that up with kind of how you go about handling attribution. So just to jump in here, my question was going to. Pivot of like, regardless of the 500 or 5, 000 investment, my question goes back to like, [00:32:00] okay, but Scott, how do we measure it? So it’s, it’s in the same vein.
Cool. That’s a good point. So let’s back up a little bit to just the overall attribution problem. If you have marketing provided this. BDR has provided this, sales provided this. By nature, you end up creating silos and scenarios in which people aren’t utilizing the resources being pumped into each one of those teams.
So, uh, I did this best at my last gig. It was a startup. So it’s easier to make pivots and changes. And if you break stuff, you don’t break much. If you’re at a big enterprise company. Uh, you can break a whole lot more. You’re in a, uh, you know, you’re in a Tiffany’s store, not like a pop up stand on the street by [00:33:00] comparison.
So, um, I would say, get to this point as much as possible. And what this is, is a whole marketing sales pipeline measured together. Not in silos. So there’s not quota retirement for each one of these buckets. You’re trying to drive one overall revenue goal, because even if you have the silos, you still have a roll up to a single revenue goal.
So marketing should be responsible for more. Sales should be responsible for the whole thing. And because they’re the ones closing the deals, marketing is even qualifying anything and the BDR should be connected tissue. So what we can do is say, all right, instead of saying, Hey, this lead came from a trade show from six months ago, because that’s the first time that lead ended up in the database.
And then BDR say. [00:34:00] Yeah, but we followed up after the show and nothing happened. And then I contacted them six months later and they picked up the phone and then I qualified them. It’s beyond your, your bandwidth of timeframe that we’ve set. And then sales goes, forget that I sold to that company, you know, forever ago.
And I VP of whatever department you sell to and. I’m the one who made that happen should BDR did some conversational work and they saw us at a trade show. So what I’m the one who closed that deal instead. The conversation should go. Hey, we have an opportunity where the person learned about us at trying not to use the whole thumbs up to get the thing.
Sorry about that. Uh, marketing created some awareness at the show and there was a conversation in the booth. With key players, the BDR went after it. They didn’t get it. They did get a connect later on that spurred a [00:35:00] discovery call. And then the A. E. came in and said, Hey, that’s great. We have an awesome champion.
I know the V. P. of that department from the last job. I’m going to bring them into the next call because I have a prior relationship with them and they’ll for sure join the next meeting. Now you’re like, wow, this is awesome. What a great team effort. This deal will probably close faster than other deals because of all this stuff that’s happened.
They heard about our content at the show. They talked to someone. The BDRs did some grunt work to get some new champions in there to have support for the VP to be okay with moving forward with learning about something new because our team is in support of it. And they now have the decision maker or contract signer just easily pulled into the deal.
And it’s all working towards one goal. So if the quota retirement can be against the full Pipeline goal and the full revenue goal. And you can just show these touch points along the line by how you structured your data and how you’re structuring [00:36:00] activity against that account or against that deal. Now you can say, yes, there were all these touch points along the way.
This worked, it worked really well. And we close that deal fast. So now we can go back and say, instead of going back and fighting over who gets credit for this, And maybe commissions are different. Maybe whatever’s different for retirement and say, I want credit for that for my goal. You can say, where are other scenarios in which we can use like team link on on linkedin navigator to find folks who the reps have sold to before you then say, okay, great, let’s take that list of folks.
We’ve sold to before and find out. If we’ve contacted those people in any mechanisms or channels in the marketing pipeline that we’ve gone after before. Oh, we see these two companies all the time at these trade shows or, oh, this company attends a lot of webinars by their individual contributors and the BDEs say, yeah, I talked to them a few months ago, but they said they weren’t ready.
They were fine with the contract of the current [00:37:00] solution, but here’s the date of when that ends. Now you’re like, oh. Here’s a great target account. And if you get a few dozen or even more of those, now you’re like, all right, let’s go win against those the same way we went against this. Cause that is the ideal way for us to close more revenue faster.
And you’re working together through that process as opposed to fighting over attribution. So how do you. Identify the ROI at the channel level then. Yep. So, uh, in the reports that I showed you, uh, there are two basic ones and you can get super granular on this as long as you’re tracking the data, uh, through the right automation, but you have, uh, this is how I do it.
I track how a name came in. Was it from a sales rep? Was it from a scan at a booth? Was it from a webinar registration? What was it? And then you just have that static in the database. Then you say, I’m going to add them 1 to many to all the salesforce. [00:38:00] I’ll just say salesforce. So we just add them to the salesforce campaigns.
Every time those people, uh, anyone Engages not as sent an invitation to something, but every time they engage register, badge, scan, whatever is in the actual Salesforce campaign. And then you track the conversion point and Salesforce automatically define conversion point for, uh, the point in which the, one of the sales reps, whether it be the BDR SDR team or the AE actually gets that first really true, valuable discovery call that leads to an opportunity.
That leads to an opportunity. You can have a discovery call and it go nowhere because of many reasons. But what is the trigger point for the opportunity? And then you see, and Salesforce does this automatically. If you convert a lead to a contact and the contact to, uh, uh, an op, [00:39:00] it. Automatically pulls in to the lead source fields, uh, and then you can have some, like, lead source details, say it’s a webinar, which webinar is it?
You just map that over with the conversion. There’s just a workflow you build for that. It automatically will attach that to the opportunity. So, you know, on the opportunity, how they came in, you see on the opportunity, uh, what the conversion point is, because those are fields that are just the 4 static fields in there for what type and then which 1.
What type and which one for entry point and conversion point. And then when you add all the sphere of influence or buying circle people to that opportunity, Salesforce will pull them into the campaign influence object on that opportunity. And you can see all the touch points there. So from that point, if you’re following me, are you following me on that?
Okay. From that point, you can say, I’m going to pull a report that shows all of our campaigns. And I want to know how many opportunities. Has this campaign [00:40:00] touched, whether it’s a close loss, close one or in motion. I want to know how many times we’ve done that or has that happened? And you can see which campaigns have the highest effect.
By volume or frequency, and if there’s a bunch of campaigns where they just never touch anything that converts or closes, probably take a deep dive into that to see. Should we ever do this again? And then, you know, how to balance your budget on using stuff that works opposite of that. Look at all your opportunities.
And look at the closed ones, look at the closed loss, look at the expansions, look at the churns, look at the, uh, um, closed one, closed loss, expansion insurance. Yeah. And see which campaigns are involved in those. And you can see the frequency of, are we even using campaigns when stuff gets closed? I’ve been in a scenario in the past where the stuff that closes touches almost no marketing campaigns.
There’s a huge disconnect there, [00:41:00] that’s a big problem, or you have a scenario in which everything that closes doesn’t, uh, everything that closes always touches these types of campaigns or all the campaigns or a mixture of them. So, you know, you’re on the right track and then you can go to the sales reps that aren’t participating with marketing and say, listen.
All these reps that are using the demand gen engine to their advantage selfishly, which they should, they’re the ones using the resources properly and they’re closing more business than you. Let’s figure out how we can get you more engaged with the marketing team so that you can also hit quota and go to club.
Uh, and it becomes a very simple discussion if it’s the other way around. Then marketing, you have to hold yourself accountable. I hold myself accountable to say, okay, is it the audience? That is the reason why no marketing campaigns are involved in closed one. Is it the messaging? Is it the, the sales process workflow?[00:42:00]
Are there huge gaps there? What is it that marketing needs to fix in order to make sure that all the money that’s get pumps and that gets pumped into marketing actually contributes to revenue. I don’t look at at it, at it as a weighted thing. I look at as a directional flag to say, go here, go there. Go here.
Go there. And then when you get into those campaigns, say, should we spend less or, or should we spend more there? Or are we overspending though it’s working and we need to cut budgets. So can we do a smaller presence at a trade show? Can we eliminate some Google AdWord keywords that just aren’t converting?
And we’ll focus on the top. 20 percent and you can tweak. Each one of those campaigns to be more cost effective. So your ROI percentage goes up outside of that. Hang on, hang on outside of like email, because you’re obviously sending to somebody specific or to degree ABM. What about [00:43:00] everything else that happens in between that static point of entry and the conversion point, like specifically ungated content, uh, social, right, any branding efforts, anything that’s zero click.
Right. So like my, my viewpoint as to what I was understanding you explain, Scott is like, there’s so many touch points that are going to happen in between entry point and conversion point, but they are reliant on actually tracking those engagements back to the individual and or account, but what about all the other marketing activities that are either like table stakes that you need to do, or are part of those zero click efforts that are going to have an influence or should be having an influence on the demand gen aspect of things.
It took us 43 minutes and 33 seconds to get to the interesting part, uh, of the, the branding non click stuff. But I think there was a lot of groundwork to cover there. So I’d like that we got to this point. [00:44:00] So Gardner involvement, Enforcer involvement, billboards that are just ancillary. There’s not a show going on, but your face is on the NASDAQ sign in Times Square, whatever it is, um, or New York stock exchange, uh, banners, um, all that stuff, the ungated content, uh, the ungated content is a little bit easier because you can have cookie tracking and within a reasonable doubt.
Directionally know which companies are hitting that to give you some direction there so that that takes care of that portion. But, uh, here’s where, uh, the company that now we’re evaluating that on what are the non lead generating stuff that we need to do. And that’s where that open communication with the sales team comes into play again.
We’re really big connects 1 outside of the U. S. You know, South Africa, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, some other countries, [00:45:00] the brand is well known and we’re one of the top players that you just evaluate it. There’s, there’s a lot of, uh, there’s not a lot of friction there. However, listening to calls and listening to the sales team, they will tell you what their roadblocks are.
And for instance, right now we’re the go to market strategy outside the U S and I’ve managed. A dual, uh, scenario before, uh, in the U S you need to be part of the fabric of your industry. And that includes a lot of ancillary stuff. If you’re an enterprise company and you’re not on the magic quadrant, are you getting people to say, nah, I, this looks cool, but I can’t risk my job or risk the company’s X on buying something that isn’t.
You know, validated through these influencing channels. So I’m creating, I have a spreadsheet where anytime a sales rep gets into a scenario where [00:46:00] they’re, they’re not able to get beyond an initial call. Because they say 1 of those things. You don’t have enough reviews on G2. You don’t have a presence on G2.
You don’t, you’re, I can only buy off the magic quadrant. Uh, how come no one’s talking about you when I go to trade shows or conferences? I’ve never seen you there. So I can’t ever. See you in person. It seems like you’re, you know, too far removed from our industry in the U. S. I can’t trust you. Uh, so whether that’s valid or not perception is reality.
So I’m finding in this scenario, the U. S. market for this specific industry does pay attention to that. And it’s not every call, but. It’s a decent percentage of them where those are roadblocks. And so you’re like, okay, well, then what should the investment be in those areas where sales is getting roadblocked?
So this is where it’s like, well, we just have to do it, right? You just said this earlier. We just, it’s just [00:47:00] a table stakes. Why is it table stakes? Might not be table stakes for you. I’ve been to a lot of places where they’re like, go, uh, you know, such and such is a table stake. Well, show me where that matters.
Show me in a sales cycle where, uh, that, that happens. And if you’re not listening to calls, you’re not listening to the sales team and the sales leaders and hearing their objections, you’ll never know. And if you’re an enterprise company or a company who does all those things, you know, like, oh, we just have to keep doing them do like the whole Chris Walker thing of just ask, you know, Hey, do you evaluate solutions and doesn’t have to be every call, but, you know, get a set of reps to get decent volume and have them throw that into the conversation really quick.
Not to dwell on it, but just a Passover question. Um, do you ever consider? For Sir Gartner in decisions, like, does it matter for your sales process with your VPs and executives when spending, you know, 100K, 50K, whatever it is on a solution. [00:48:00] No, that’s all pay for play. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or not. That’s all pay for play, but it does cover my ass when I have to go make a solution suggestion to rip and replace something that could disrupt business.
If it falls apart, um, or they’re like, yeah, G2, uh, reviews, we get that. A lot of negative stuff happens there. Uh, but. It does provide us some insight to be able to, you know, see if the things people are complaining about are the things that we even care about. Because a lot of times a bad review is something that’s so niche to the business.
And you can even like in G2, you can highlight and create a landing page there where you can. Pull in specific quotes and say, and even pull in some negative ones. Like he had, I highlighted a three out of five star review, uh, for my last company, where the guy goes in his headline, 30 to 40 percent of all my sales meetings are booked with this solution.
And then continue to complain [00:49:00] about us. Awesome headline, horrible pros and cons, but the pros and cons he was talking about were very specific to their business. So I just pointed the CS team at it, say, Hey, can you help this person with it? And then I use that quote to show, Hey, here’s something, here’s the context of it.
This could benefit you because the worst suggestion and the worst rating that we have is actually someone who’s seeing immense benefit from what we’re providing to them. And you can utilize that stuff in a sales cycle. Um, and that diverts from your question a little bit, but again, goes back to that open communication to say, is it needed?
Is it not? When is it collect some data around it and go for it just to end this, sorry for rambling, but trade shows, you know, the marketing leadership sometimes, and even the CFO is like, we spent so much money at this show. Why should we even go to it? Seems like a waste of money [00:50:00] and there’s no, uh, there seems to be no attribution in the system for it, except batch scans.
And there’s, it’s really hard to draw that dotted line or even a solid line from revenue to that event. And I was like, okay, I felt like it was something where if you want to be part of the fabric of that industry, of that solution set that is gold standard, you got to be there and you got to present and you got to be present, but.
I was told you can’t draw a line. Let’s not do it. If sales reps aren’t engaged as they should be, don’t do it. We didn’t go to one of the biggest industry shows for the month following. I got messages from, from the salespeople and from, to me directly. Uh, cause I know a lot of people who go to that show and our customers or potential customers.
And they’re like, are you going out of business? Why weren’t you there? You’re always at that show. Uh, should I be worried? Should we look at other solutions? Is something going on? And. I [00:51:00] consolidated that, built a business case for it, presented it to everyone and said, here’s why I think we should continue to go to the show.
Because look at this backlash. We just created, went to the show the next year, won the award for best, uh, solution in that category and all was good in the world again, and we knew data backed and contextual, uh, information added to that data to say, Hey, Let’s go. But 2 things. Let’s be smarter about what we spend at that show.
Let’s be more engaging with the audience to drive more leads. So let’s have a better dinner. Let’s invite better people. Let’s get our people to the show who are in the pipeline and make it more of a sales centric motion so that. Everyone greenlights that project from the get go. It’s amazing. I think people often forget that the hardest part about making a part of part about marketing is bringing people from unaware to aware.
And that’s like something that you never really see on paper. I mean, [00:52:00] us as an agency, I’ll tell you what, like, if you like, there’s agencies that people have heard of through their network and there’s agencies that people haven’t heard of and, you know, me serving. An ad to somebody doesn’t, you know, there’s a long process of, like, making somebody aware of something.
And that’s where those industry events are huge because, you know, yeah, you might not get anything from it, but, you know, you’re part of the community, it associates you with other brands, right? Like, that’s another thing. Like, I just think of like us as an agency, like, yeah, it would be great to be Like associated in the same circle as like directive refined labs.
But like, if people had that in their mind, then you start being paired to those other brands, which I think is really hard for any company that’s like smaller, especially like what you’re dealing with right now, you know, trying to build, it sounds like you’re trying to build like the U S market, like that’s really important here.
Yep. Yep. And you talked about the LinkedIn stuff because the companies you talked about do a ton of online presence and it’s hard to [00:53:00] measure that. Like I did a post and I had X amount of clicks and I had X amount of engagement on comments and maybe it’s what you want. Maybe it’s not what you want. Uh, but that’s stuff that you just can’t track and you ask them and it’s on the form and it never ends up.
Bubbling up, but you know, the content is good. You know, people are looking at it because LinkedIn doesn’t give you the full spectrum of how much influence it has. And even in some of my videos that I’ve done, there’s significant long tail. You even talked about it on your stuff. There’s significant long tail benefits you can get on just continued awareness that.
The algorithm puts it out into the ether more and more and more as people engage. So, if you’re trying to push some of that engagement, well, guess what? Take your target account list. You know the content’s good. You know it has a good message. You know it’s worked a handful of times or less. So, it’s validated.
Well, have that be a sponsored ad in a matched [00:54:00] list with your target list. So you can force that content when you validate that it’s the good stuff into their feeds so that they see it now, you can track it. Because you’re like, Oh, these engagement rates are just everyone on LinkedIn. Well, now you’re like the engagement rates are everyone within the exact account sales is going after.
And then those engagement metrics aren’t fluff. They are hard. These people saw this, these likes are from your accounts. Hey, sales reps go into this ad or this link to this post and look at the people who liked it. Guess what? They’re probably going to pick up the phone and have a conversation with you faster than anybody else.
Yeah, it’s just another way to validate it. Like, honestly, I love what you were talking about when you were talking about like G2 and all of that stuff and how you actually validate those investments. I feel like you can use ads to do the same thing. You can use events to do [00:55:00] the same thing and like actually having a reason behind it.
That is, I mean, it’s more contextual than it is like data driven necessarily. People like people are talking about these things and you test the involvement, then you see if it actually makes a difference. Like you actually have a foot to stand on in those conversations rather than, Oh, this is our brand awareness play.
We got 10, 000 impressions, like that kind of stuff. Okay. So there we got 10, 000 impressions. And if you stop at that point. And I’m sales. Yeah, I’m pissed at you. This is dumb. Let me see those filters. And it says VP, director, this industry, this industry, company sizes. Yeah, but what you’re doing, if you take it a step further, is say, just like you used to do with blog posts when they got a lot of traction, you would say, we’re putting this content out.
For yes, general awareness to the market. But what we’re going to do is take the best posts that get the most organic traffic within just the general world of, we don’t know who [00:56:00] the hell is getting this, but we have these criteria and then we’re creating that target list. We’re then going to pull the names for that target list.
We’re then going to add that to your target list account after you filter it out. And. Make a segment for them to say, all right, or an audience in your social media platform, whatever it is, and we’re going to put ads that specific ad that works into their flows. And then that is why we’re doing that, because then you can connect the best stuff there.
So, yes, it is fluff. Yes, you can’t do a lot with it, except if you take it that step further, then they go. Okay. Now, instead of saying, why are you doing this? This is stupid. Sales is saying, which posts were working this this last month because I can use that in my talk track. I didn’t know I should be talking about that.
Oh, here’s my target account list that aligns to that message that I saw. Got a [00:57:00] ton of organic traffic. Could you add this to the, this group of people that I’m going after? Because I have Personal connections to them into an ad flow for that. All right. So as we bring today’s episode to a close, Scott, one of the last questions we’d like to ask every guest is we’ve got our magic wand here, literally a wand.
And if we give it to you, what is the biggest problem with B2B that you are solving with it today? Oh man,
I would say, and sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard, but all your. Conversion problems, all your pipeline problems, everything boils down to are you able to work internally the way you need to work internally for your marketing efforts to [00:58:00] work? And then are you going to take that feedback and create an environment to create that flow of information back and forth where you can make adjustments and improve?
So it’s, can we have, can we get everyone on board to say. Yes, we’re going to go off of one revenue goal, and we’re not going to fight over attribution. Yes, we can go and have, uh, goals that align all the way back. Can we plan together? Can marketing be involved in the sales planning? Can sales be brought into the marketing planning?
Can we? Not have analysis by paralysis through so many meetings that it’s wasting time, but can we structure these communication channels in a way that makes it efficient for us to communicate and make the most out of those fewer interactions within the teams? Uh, if you have a big organization with a smaller organization, it’s pretty easy.
You’re working together all the time anyway, or should be. [00:59:00] Can we wave the magic wand and remove the barriers internally? So that we can align and it’s all boils down to having everyone agree on a mutual goal, identifying the things that aren’t working and then changing them in a way where everyone sees the full vision and everyone knows how to use each other’s resources to get to that goal.
And a lot of times that’s that’s harder than you think. Sometimes. People are open to it and they say, we never thought of it that way. That actually sounds good. Now, the problem with that is then you often have to change comp structures. Then you often have to change goals. Uh, marketing no longer has an MQL goal.
We’ve always had MQL goals. This, this is a panic attack. Uh, no, you want to not waste money and do things that sales doesn’t follow up on. And in marketing may panic about MQLs [01:00:00] going down. Well, let’s work on how to be more strategic. Because the conversion rate matters more than the volume in my mind.
Once you understand where the conversion rates spike, then you can worry about the volume, because maybe it’s field events where you get 15 people in a room, but you close, like, maybe 8 of the 15 people turn into pipeline and half of those or more win. Well, then I care way more about a smaller volume because your conversion rates are getting you more than.
MQL goals later on. All right. So bring us on home with three actionable takeaways for our audience to do today or tomorrow. Okay. So three actionable insights. One, if you’re not working and talking openly and candidly with your sales team. You should go do that and figure out what that what that is. Um, start at the top and kind of prep everyone [01:01:00] to say, here’s some things that we see are internal barriers was open communication.
We want to change the culture in which we’re doing things and make it better. And then are we. Once we’re on that same page, review the goals with everybody too. So, in that meeting, say, now we need to change some goals. Is everyone okay with that? You’ll need to bring finance into it. It’s a bit of a slog at 1st and then, uh, if you can start with that conversation, then do that.
The other thing, uh, is if you’re. Uh, demand gen team isn’t working with the BDRs and you don’t know them face to face. My wife always jokes when someone goes, Hey, uh, I noticed Scott’s this company. I work with that company or Kristen will say so and so works at that company. And I asked her husband or her his wife what the, uh, if they know Scott and the joke is you can’t not know Scott.
If you’re on [01:02:00] the go to market team and he’s at the company, it’s just, it’s not done where you don’t know who I am. Uh, you should have an open communication with the team and we’ll be working with the sales team right away. Awesome. Well, Scott, thank you so much for joining us today. How can people connect with you online?
See more of your content, et cetera. LinkedIn is a way to go. All right. All right. Well, thanks everybody for joining us for another episode of digital banter live. Scott, again, thank you for. Join in today’s episode, connect with Scott on LinkedIn. Check out his content, DM him for questions, things like that.
That might come up within reason, of course, and like subscribe and check out dragon three 60. com till next time. Catch you guys later. Thanks everyone.
Thanks for listening to the Digital Vanter podcast. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss an episode. For more resources and to keep up with the show, visit [01:03:00] dragon360. com. Until next time.