Marketing & Sales Alignment: Despite all the talk, only a handful of companies have it figured out. Sometimes, marketing listens to sales calls; occasionally, both teams are tied to the same revenue target. Nevertheless, the leads passed from marketing to sales often fall short in quality, and closing MQLs seems like an insurmountable challenge for the sales team. The lack of cohesion between marketing and sales keeps on giving. On this week’s episode of Digital Banter LIVE, we’re thrilled to welcome Lara Erdem from Dreamdata to our show. From what we hear on the streets, she seems to have cracked the code on marketing and sales alignment. Join us for this week’s episode as we delve into her insights and uncover what genuine marketing and sales alignment truly entails.
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.
We are excited to have Laura Erdem from dream data on as our guest today.
Laura, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. I’m looking forward to this. This is live. This is fun. All right. So first off, first question here, before I toss it to James is. Teach him how to ride a bike with a selfie stick. So he does not fall over the handlebars. So you’re starting from [00:01:00] like the best content ever.
You should like wait and see way people at the end of this video. You gotta be, you gotta stop the scroll. Okay, so to start with, you have to choose a road that is not too much traffic and not too many people. Then you have to choose a bike that is pretty stable. I have two bikes and one of them is not stable.
I don’t film on that one, but the one that is more stable, a little bit more sporty bike, then it’s kind of stable. And then. I don’t use a selfie stick. It’s like this, you’ve got your hand on one wheel, the phone and the other one and just continue talking. And then one eye is looking on the road because you have to make sure you’re not dropping anything or not driving into anything.
And the other one is here. But then there’s a lot of editing as well, because there’s always like, Oh, wait, somebody went past by with a dog or, Oh, I just said something. Right. The [00:02:00] very typical video stuff. But then again, it’s like, Oh no, you see this. And. To make it a little bit more entertaining, usually it’s, it goes for all the videos that you’re making, switch the angles once in a while.
So if you were filming like this all the time, then maybe finish off the video filming like this so people can see something passing by over here or like this because then they only can see the road on the back. So these are my tips for the physical education on this one. You’ll have to come to Copenhagen and we’re going to do this.
I don’t know. I think I’m, I’m like maybe now convinced that my system was a little bit safer. I had the, I was, I made sure that I put the helmet on. Cause I knew like, I was going to get called out for that right away. And then the selfie stick, I’ll say like my phone was a little heavy and it kept like turning.
So I had to take it and just wrap the selfie stick in electrical tape. And then I was good from there. The angles is key though, because I will say the ride that I went on was down. Uh, It was a nice [00:03:00] ride, like right along like the Hudson river and you couldn’t see any of it. All you could see was like whatever it was behind me because like the river was over there.
Maybe I could have gotten away with this, but I also probably would have ended up in a ditch on the side of the road, but But you had a helmet. My daughter really, really complains all the time. Our picture galleries are connected on our phones and says, Oh mom, you have been out filming again on the bike.
So. What was your helmet? . . Yes. Troll. Troll from the kid. There we go. , it’s, it’s bound to happen, you know, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not as much. I feel like it’d be more adults, trolling kids. Like if you, if you posted a bike without a helmet, a without a helmet in like a mom parenting group, that’s, that’s where you’re really gonna go off, but, oh, I, I did.
Maybe not as much talked a lot. No, no, no. There are a lot of people who are teaching good 50 lessons. Thank you for that. That’s good. So anyways, real topic [00:04:00] of today, a word on the street is that you and your marketing team have figured out sales alignment. I know you’re going to roll your eyes and say, maybe that’s not true because I’ve heard you say that before.
Um, so I guess like I want to start with the, I don’t know, we, we lay out these podcasts where we want to create conflict first. So what’s your biggest problem with The marketing team, where is the, where’s this piece that, uh, maybe there isn’t as much alignment as you wish. Yeah, I think our problem starts a little bit at a different place than the usual company’s problem.
So we have an amazing CMO and he loves data and everything that can be measured, especially further down the pipeline is awesome. It’s like, Oh, we’re able to do this. We’re able to measure that. So one of the parts where we were disagreeing at the beginning was face to face events. And usually. Marketers love [00:05:00] face to face events because you get to do some of the roll ups and giveaways and do a booth and this and that.
And Stefan is like, you want to go there? Okay. So buy your ticket and go. Like, come on, let’s do something more. Say, yeah, but. Yeah, let’s try this out. So the first year I went to Sastr alone from the whole company to San Francisco on a free diversity ticket. By the way, remember a woman is a diversity in tech.
So it was free to go there. I got a flight ticket, a hotel, and then I went to Sastr. I came back. We filled out all the documents. Um, and we speak to? We had a little event on the site. I got an approval to host a little pizza event. That was also cool. And we could see that the ROI is going over the roof of the people that we’re meeting and later on the deals that we’re creating and further [00:06:00] closing.
It takes like around a year to close that deal, but you already can see the SQLs and the new business deals created and all that. Then we started making bigger plans and sending more people. So far, no plans having any booths because it is very expensive and I don’t think it’s worth it either. But for us, if it’s difficult to measure, then marketing would say, Hmm, maybe not.
In other places, usually it starts in the other direction where marketing wants to be creative. We want to do stuff and just sales does not pick up all of those amazing deals. No marketing. And dream data is creating demand that sales is picking up and working on those. We’re measuring how long time does it take?
How much does it cost to drive and MQL, SQL and cost per acquisition of the various channels and so on. So we’re at another place where I have to push for, I don’t know, billboards. [00:07:00] That is shocking. That is, you’re right. That is the exact opposite of every other organization out there. I mean, usually. Even my, in my, like, obviously you guys are a tracking company and probably have that sorted out a little bit better than most companies, but an event, it’s just like, okay, here’s the list of people we met at the event.
What happened with them versus the, Hey, we’re running this hero brand campaign, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How many leads did we get from it? Like that’s normally the conversation that everybody has. So I guess I’m actually, one of the things I was really excited to talk to you about is I would like to hear.
I’m going to ask you a loaded question. Like, how do you guys assign credit? And how, essentially, how do you guys handle that at DreamData? I love this. So, one of the key problems that marketers come over to us, to look into attributions, say, okay, so, [00:08:00] how do we assign credit, as you’re asking? So, how do we make sure that marketing touches?
are credited for and everybody can see the impact that marketing is having on our pipeline. We’re starting from the wrong direction. We don’t care about the credit. We care about what works. So to start with marketing, a dream data works. We know which channels sources come in and which campaigns are driving most of the pipeline.
And if that deal was started by Laura posting on LinkedIn and somebody coming in later. Or marketing, releasing a new feature release and somebody coming in from that part. We don’t really care. The only thing we care about is to figure out which campaigns are driving our pipeline and which of those should we be doing more of in order to get similar clients that either close faster or the deals are bigger comparing to what you’re trying to achieve.
So, so there is no credits [00:09:00] taking or credit giving is just insights into what’s actually working. And trying to figure out how we can scale this. For example, we are just yet not doing outbound and. And the reason for that is because marketing inbounds are so powerful and successful that the people that we hire in sales actually have to start taking inbounds, which, well, you might say, Oh, lazy people and so on.
But as soon as we will start doing outbound, then we will also be doing exactly the same thing to figure out what is working so we can scale this. Maybe outbound is not working. We just need to test this out. Maybe it’s not working. We just have to shovel more money into marketing and wait for those inbound leads.
to come. So there is no credit taking credit given. There is appreciation of stuff that is working. For example, the Times Query billboard. Well, that was just a joke. It was a joke that I ordered a billboard where the [00:10:00] CEO saying, yes, do it. And don’t say that to the CMO. It’s fine. Surprise him. And then suddenly now we’re seeing how much buzz it got on LinkedIn already.
I’m not done. I’m going to be posting about that for a really long time because it shows the creativity and what type of company you’re working with. A little bit of that branding thing that you cannot really measure, but this is not a credit that I’m here to take. I got what I needed. I surprised Stefan.
That’s it. But the next thing that marketing is looking into is like, how can we consistently create some of those campaigns and stuff that delights people or attracts them to look at dream data? And when they do have. A need for an attribution solution. Well, they will know about that company that created a billboard on Times Square that cannot be attributed.
Now, sorry, James, just real quick. So Laura, do you think that the lack of caring about credit is a result of. Cultural nuances, or is it [00:11:00] because of success that you’ve seen? And therefore you don’t need to worry about credit because you have momentum versus an organization that may not have the same momentum that you guys have and credit and finger pointing and all that kind of comes into play because of it.
I think it’s more to do with the data. We do have a lot of data available and there is a lot of that gut feeling check as well as like what is working, what is not where. As soon as company feels like they don’t have enough data to understand what’s actually working, then you see that credit taken and credit giving and the wish for us, like I drove this huge campaign and we don’t know how many leads came through it.
Well, then it hurts for everyone. And it’s not really credit taken or given. We just need to figure out if it was actually working because deep inside in my gut feeling, I feel that it was worthy, but sales says that it was a shitty campaign because it didn’t bring anything. Um, All the leads that are coming are outbound that we’re doing.
Probably it’s both, but we [00:12:00] need to figure out how much more or less, because that demand creation is probably a lot helped by proper outbound as well. That’s why I’m really excited to start outbound at DreamData as well, because we have created so much demand. That if we targeted, go off to companies that we haven’t seen yet, but would be perfect clients for us and for them to buy dream data, that means that we will be able to prove that that demand was created properly and we knew the touches that were happening throughout it.
So kind of, I think it’s the lack of insights and data that drives people to really, really wish to have more. So then how do you balance the desire and love of data like Stefan has, right? Against. getting in the weeds and falling into the trap of looking at data for the sake of trying to, I don’t know, just falling into the trap of overloaded with data and losing [00:13:00] sight of the top level narrative.
Setting the right targets. So figuring out what are you measuring and why are we trying to measure this and what are we going, what kind of decisions are we going to take if we figure out. That this is working or not, and what is it that we are trying to figure out because yes, you can be overloaded by data and say, Oh, look at that.
This campaign has been driving so many impressions or so many clicks, but then did it actually drive deals? How long time did it take for us to close those deals? Okay, so if we were to compare this campaigns versus the other campaign. How long time did it take for us to close those clients or maybe that campaign only touched clients before closure, which is also amazing.
Then we can do targeting towards the deals that are about to close. So I think it’s very much about the goal setting. What is it that we’re measuring and what kind of decisions are we going to take? So let’s go in that direction. Now, the, was it the, when everybody talks about marketing sales [00:14:00] alignment, they’re like, Oh yeah, let’s share a revenue target.
Right. And it’s almost like. That’s it. And it’s like, that doesn’t really work either. So I’d like you to go into the weeds a bit more on how you align on goals and how you stick to that through the course of time. So marketing knows again, back to that, how long time does it take for us to close some certain deals coming from some certain channels and we know how much did it cost for us historically to bring in some certain leads.
Which also helps them to forecast how much do we need to bring enough pipeline to sales in order to start closing those. So we do have sales numbers, how long time and what is the percentage of closure for some certain deals, size and industry and which channels do they come from. And then marketing.
Does their own [00:15:00] calculation, what is it that we need to hit in order to get that? And then there are a lot of bets on top of that as well, because you can do the planning, uh, we’re going to put X amount on Google and Y amount on, I don’t know, send salespeople to the face to face events, but then there are some of the bets that you’re taking along the year that you still have not tried and it might be useful, but.
Let’s try to do it as cheap and as little effort as possible to test if it’s working. So don’t put all of your eggs in one basket, but test it out. Maybe it’s cool and let’s do more of that. We figured out how to run, for example, Our product releases and those product releases seem to be a very big attraction of more clients to put their eyes into dream data, because you start talking about very niche cases.
We started to try it with one, the campaign was not too big to begin with, but later we figured out, okay, if we add all the [00:16:00] people posting on LinkedIn, asking somebody else to help us out to post this on LinkedIn, or what do we do with them? Uh, what is the, the company called? That’s where they, where you release your product release.
What is it called now? Uh, like the press release company? No, not the press. Yeah. Anyway. So we like started to add more and more campaigns on top of that for those small niche product releases. And building on top of this now we know, okay, before we do a product release now, what is the plan that we’re going to need to do?
And it becomes bigger and bigger, the release itself for each and every smaller product as product piece too. But at the beginning it was not too big, but we just saw that it’s actually working. So both effort and money spent has to be balanced. How do you stay aligned on that then? So I imagine there’s gotta be some disagreements [00:17:00] here and there around how money is invested and which campaigns are, because I’ll tell you from like the marketing side of things.
I always have the mentality of like, you want to do a couple of things and you want to do a couple of things really, really well. And it sounds like you guys have quite a few things going on. So, I mean, right there, I think I would have a little bit of a disagreement as far as like, you know, how we’re investing time and money.
So how do you stay. How do you stay aligned on, like, those little things and those little tests and, you know, also iterate over time? Yeah, so some of the things we just don’t ask, just try. If it costs nothing and requires very little of your energy, just go do it. Try it out and see, like the biking videos.
But, but some of the things, so… Marketing is always in the sales pipeline meetings to know how are we closing the deals? What’s working? What the clients are talking about? What’s the struggle? Why can’t we just fucking close that deal within a month? [00:18:00] And it has to take a couple of them. And we have a monthly commercial meeting where each and every commercial team, sales and marketing and customer success also are presenting what is it that we’re working on.
And that’s where we can see what marketing is working on, what’s coming as well. The same goes for product. Every, all hands has an update on the product. What are product releases upcoming? Can we speak about them? Can we speak about them on one to one calls? Can we speak about those on LinkedIn? What is marketing planning to do it all?
So we’re all aligned, but I don’t have any say on marketing’s budget. I could wish for more leads. And we speak about that saying, Oh, it seems like it’s low this month. What can we do next month or what can we do now in order for next month to be a little higher on leads or are we are at capacity in sales.
So maybe now try to focus more on the [00:19:00] European team leads and so on. So everybody’s more equal, but we have no say on the budget. It’s more alignment on the pipeline and on the revenue goals that we need to. So Laura, do you feel that. Um, those monthly conversations are frequent and often enough for marketing and sales to really align on things and make sure that you’re hitting those targets or what’s your recommendation on how often those two teams should be talking to each other?
We talk all the time. It’s just, this is more official where like everybody’s sitting around the table and showing what they’re doing, what they’re planning and everybody has an inside of. What’s going on? Um, but other than that, it’s like, it’s very regular that several times per week, Stefan comes over and just sits besides me and it’s like, what’s up?
I have an idea. Okay. What’s the idea? What if we do this? Okay. I’ll go try and do that. And then you try and do that. And then what was the, the. I think the last idea was that we have to talk about more of the dream data, free offerings actually pretty [00:20:00] cool and a lot of companies charge for it. Let’s talk more about this.
And I started to talk more about this and we got more free signups on top of that. And that’s not pipeline yet, but, but it’s good stuff that marketing figured out, okay, this is working or constantly marketing say, Oh, look, those companies are on our pricing page. So that, that is happening all the time because we care about the same thing.
It’s just those official meetings are once a month where we just gather all the ideas together. So that works for you because you guys are, have a great relationship. You’re side by side, right? You’re in it together, but as you become a bigger company over the course of time, that’s going to change. Like we see it all the time with our enterprise clients.
You see it all the time with your enterprise clients, silos, upon silos, upon silos, and left hand ain’t talking to the right. Uh, so how do you, how do you create structure around at least. A focal point of recurring conversation so that you’re not blindsided by, you know, Hey, sales needs more leads in Europe [00:21:00] and you’re on the marketing side.
Like what the hell I’m fricking running all these campaigns as is like, what else do you want me to do? Yeah. Yeah. It goes back to alignment and those goals like monthly or quarterly or yearly goals that you set and. Constant check in. Where are we in those? What can we else do? And also, I mean, sales, I say that all the time.
Sales and marketing, it’s not a friendship. It’s not because I like, Stefan is my best friend and we’re going for a beer every second evening to just hang out. No. No, we’re working together. We are aligned on revenue. We are aligned on stuff that matters for our clients, for our company to grow. And also that kind of respect also gives the respect back of each other’s craft.
So Stefan or whoever in the marketing team would know how hard it is right now to close clients, customer journeys are getting longer. The same goes for marketing, which of the channels are getting very [00:22:00] expensive. Should we renew that? Subscription with whatever provider X or should we put more rep more?
Into, I don’t know, Google ads or something like that. So we’re all in clear alignment. And I think it’s very similar for larger companies as well, but somebody has to steer it. Somebody has to care not only about the numbers, but also about the best wishes of the person who’s running some specific programs that they’re doing their best job and the rest just needs to support them and understand that it might either take time or that person needs some help.
So who’s that person? Who’s that person got to be like outside of dream data? Who’s that person needs to be in every organization or most of them? I think it should be, it’s of course, now it’s like a La La land of everybody’s very happy and chanting together. But like, this is a management job all in all to care about the people and how they’re running their business.
Are [00:23:00] they okay? Cause sometimes they’re doing their best job, but maybe they’re. Press at their family life or whatever it is. And if you have that care, even though in the remote. Um, world in all of the positions being not face to face and not besides each other, but knowing that people are putting their best job they can do and trying to figure out how can their leaders or their peers can remove some of the obstacles for people to do the best job.
This is the way to do it. But again, this is so fluffy of what I’m saying. Um, for our example, for example, so we are in the America’s team. We are for people right now. And we have a team’s commission on sales. So I don’t have a specific target alone. We’re closing deals together, bringing in the right people into the right situation.
Somebody is more technical. Somebody is better to activating the intent of the leads and so on. So we’re bringing in the [00:24:00] right people, exposing them to what brings them energy and what makes them the best at the job. To close that revenue. So if I need help from somebody every single day, we sit down with the set, stand up, not sit down, stand up with the sales team to talk about what kind of help do you need?
What did you learn yesterday? If you need some help, bring in somebody from the team. We’re going to close that deal together. And it’s the same care about like, all of us are doing our best job possible. And sometimes you’ve got shitty days, but most of the times you’ve got very good days because somebody cares about what you’re doing.
And it goes the same for all of the organization. I wish. But it’s going to be hard. Did I catch this right? You said you guys have like a shared compensation model. That makes a lot of sense. Cause one of the questions I was going to ask is, I feel like, you know, we talk about marketing sales line and it comes back to revenue targets, but really at the end of the day, like you said, it’s about individuals and like their livelihood, like on the [00:25:00] team and.
The biggest problem I see is marketing is compensated on a salary and sales is compensated on a commission, right? So marketing, I mean, the, the normal, that thing that everybody talks about is marketing hits their MQL targets and sales isn’t hitting their revenue targets. And that’s why there’s misaligned because they don’t care because quite frankly, they’re compensated differently.
Do you think that that compensation piece is like, A major component to alignment. Not necessarily. We figured out that this works because it’s easier to help each other work best when you’re not only gold and aimed at your own target to close. But, but not, I don’t think so. I mean, it is weird that marketing is only measured on MQLs.
What leads are you bringing in? And nobody would care what happens below, but there are still so many organizations that think that, Oh, the [00:26:00] quantity would equal. quantity that comes out. If I bring in 10 times more leads, well, we will close 10 times more deals. And that’s not necessarily true. So again, data alignment, caring about where every person is getting energy from and doing their best job in order to close that those targets that were set by the teams.
I think this is the key, but for us that the other part works a lot. Very often I get the question about LinkedIn, especially from the very sales driven organizations saying, so Laura, you’re so active on LinkedIn. So how do you claim leads that are coming to you? And how do you figure out like who brought in the lead?
If somebody liked and comments into your posts and then later come in and in as inbound, how do you know, how would you take that credit? I won’t. The only thing I care about, the reason I’m on LinkedIn. is to represent Dream Data [00:27:00] as brand. It gives me energy. It gives me energy that Andy brings out the bike and shows funny videos of how he’s trying to fix it.
And James is trying to ride it. That brings me energy because this is something people likes. But, but in addition to that, I only care about bringing out quality content that people will find us for. And if that’s a European lead or American lead, I don’t really care. This is something that is happening for the whole company.
And this is really rewarding. All right. So as we start to bring today’s episode to a close, we’ve got a couple of questions here. Number one, Laura, what can marketing do? So what can James and I can do in marketing side of this equation to make sales lives easier? Like what, what can we bring to the table to make your life as a salesperson easier?
Um, to start with care about the leads that are coming in and even check in on the deals that were working. [00:28:00] So it’s, it shows that you’re not just pushing them over the edge and here you go, sales close it. And then later. So what’s up? How’s it going? Oh, so you didn’t close them. You didn’t ban them. Huh?
It’s like, maybe they’re not close yet. And, but instead of that care about. What is happening internally for them. Let’s figure out what kind of content can we help out those people who are trying to buy in order to sell to them easier and to educate them easier. And at the same time, sales will be then going back to you and telling them what actually is working.
If you don’t have the data for it, you actually want to know like what kind of content did they find valuable? What kind of content do I need in order to expose that to our clients? So that care about the leads that you’re bringing in. This is your lead. Marketing brought in the lead. You have to care about this.
[00:29:00] It’s not something you push over the edge, even though you brought in a thousand leads this month. Some of those are such ideal clients. You actually want to know, did we close them? We didn’t. Why not? What happened? What could have been, what could we have done differently? Yeah. And you, you kind of answered the second question I was going to ask around like.
How do we get a vice versa on the marketing side from sales? And it is, it’s about that communication. It’s about that dissemination of information and those insights that you’re gaining in, you know, prospect conversations and calls, you know, the, the actual deals that are going through. And I think the other thing too, just to bring the agency perspective into this, that dissemination can’t stop like within the walled gardens of the internal organization, when you’re working with external partners, that’s the stuff you have to bring to the table, because that allows us.
On that external partnership view of things from marketing to continue to move the needle, to continue to, as you said, throughout this entire episode, where like scale, what’s working, figure out what’s not and why, and ultimately [00:30:00] everyone. Aligned to those targets at the end of the day. So, yeah, yeah, exactly.
I do care about marketing a lot. Alright, now here’s the question that James was going to try and steal from me with repackaging it. But, I said there would be wands, so I stole my son’s Harry Potter wand. So, Laura, if you could wave the magic wand. What’s the biggest problem in B2B marketing right now that you would fix?
The biggest problem, I think, even though I do care a lot about measurements, mapping the pipeline and so on, most of the marketers and sales, they are aware of this and they think this matters. But if I had that one that B2B.
Be not boring. Thank you. I was at the Hotjar conference on Friday and [00:31:00] it was a mix of B2B and B2Cs and it was amazing to watch all those fantastic websites and initiatives that B2Cs are doing in order to get the clients because somehow they feel much closer to the client because it’s just a couple of touches and they buy that shoe or whatever that is.
For B2Bs, we have to be so stiff and so serious. Like, Oh, we do this. We help companies with transformation of this. And Oh, say what, like, let’s figure this out. What we’re actually helping them with. Let’s have a little bit of personality for companies to actually have that interest and a little bit of a different angle.
There are some very good brands and right now. Who are trying to do it and it’s fantastic. And usually it comes through with their people that they actually have and their creativity, which I love. And let’s do more of that, even though it feels itchy and you want to do transformation websites, save time and money, you know, [00:32:00] exactly.
All right, Laura, do you have three actionable takeaways for our audience today? Align on your targets between sales and marketing. This is very important. Try to care about each other as professionals. To help them out and be more LinkedIn and be less boring. Then it’s fun for everybody. Perfect. All right, Laura.
So how can people reach out and connect with you, but also learn more about dream data? Well, they have to come to Copenhagen and take a bike ride with me. He’s not expensive. No, he’s not getting for this now. He’s not like, don’t even start the, Oh, mate. Yeah, listen, I have the free trial. If I’m a qualified lead, they’ll reach out.
James, come, you have to ride the bike for our discovery call. I’m on LinkedIn. If you want to watch me do stupid things and ride or do some clever things as well. Follow me, ask any [00:33:00] questions and I’ll be as diligent as possible to answer those. And yeah, we’re awesome. We are. Well, Laura, thank you so much for joining us today.
Like subscribe, check out digital banter live, check out Laura’s content and check out dream data. Catch you guys later. Thank you.
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