Key Takeaways:
- Sales and Marketing Alignment:
- Sales and marketing need to work closely together to ensure a seamless customer journey. Marketing creates awareness and generates leads, while sales drives conversion. When both teams are aligned, they can optimize this flow and enhance business performance.A common challenge is the division between the two teams, often referred to as “silos.” Breaking these silos leads to better communication, consistent messaging, and ultimately improved sales
- Defining the Role of Sales:
- Sales is about creating mutual value between the business and the customer. The best salespeople identify customer pain points and offer solutions, fostering long-term relationships rather than focusing solely on transactionsSales today is not just about closing deals but also about partnership—helping customers succeed by aligning their needs with what the business can offer
- Funnel and Customer Journey:
- Sales and marketing must recognize that the traditional funnel is no longer linear. Today’s customer journey involves multiple touchpoints, from marketing’s brand-building efforts to sales’ direct interactions. Both teams should work in sync to nurture leads throughout this processHubSpot’s Flywheel model, which emphasizes attracting, engaging, and delighting customers, can serve as a better representation of the modern sales cycle. The process continues as customers come back for repeat business, making it a continuous cycle rather than a one-time transaction
- Building Relationships with Customers:
- Sales is more than just acquiring new customers—it’s about building and nurturing long-term relationships. Even after a deal is closed, marketing and sales should continue engaging the customer to ensure satisfaction and encourage future businessRegular communication with customers helps build trust. Agencies and businesses must constantly prove their expertise to remain relevant and be seen as trusted partners
- Customer Success and Sales:
- Successful sales teams align themselves with customer success. Their focus shifts from just closing deals to ensuring that customers find long-term value in the products or services offered. This alignment leads to repeat business and strengthens customer relationships
- Salesperson’s Role in the Company:
- A salesperson’s job is to maximize growth potential by converting leads into customers and driving revenue. However, everyone in a company, from the CEO to the designer, plays a part in selling. Each team member contributes to customer interactions that can lead to sales
- Mutual Feedback Between Sales and Marketing:
- Sales teams bring valuable customer insights to the table. Marketers should regularly seek feedback from sales on what messages resonate with prospects. In turn, marketing can provide sales with the necessary tools and content to help them close deals.
Tools and Practical Tips:
- CRM Systems: Use tools like HubSpot or Salesforce to manage customer relationships and ensure that both sales and marketing teams have visibility across the customer journey.
- Collaboration Tools: Leverage Slack, Asana, or Trello for regular communication between sales and marketing teams to align on campaigns, share customer feedback, and track progress.
- Ongoing Training: Invest in ongoing sales training, such as HubSpot Academy or Spin Selling, to equip your sales team with the skills they need to stay customer-focused and drive long-term business.
These takeaways emphasise the need for close collaboration between marketing and sales, understanding the customer journey, and nurturing long-term customer relationships.
Full transcript (captured by AI, may contain errors)
Speaker 1: Hi and welcome to another Marketing Meetup podcast. My name is James and we have just finished with a brilliant chat with three incredible individuals, all in different size companies, all with sales backgrounds, helping marketers understand how to bridge the gap between the campaigns that they run and the sales departments that they need to work with. Now before we jump into the webinar I’d love to just say a big shout out to our featured partner of the week which is Exclaimer. Exclaimer is a tool that manages your email signatures globally across companies. That can be if you’re a really small company right through to a really big company and it acts as an additional marketing channel as well. So please do go and check out Exclaimer. They’re great people, they’ve got a great tool, we use it, we think it’s fabulous. I think it will be really helpful for you too. But also a big shout out to Frontify, Sticky Beak, Plannable, Cambridge Marketing College and Redgate Software who is actually, we’ve got in the calls today, we’ve got someone from their sales team. So yeah, it’s a really fascinating talk. I really hope you enjoy it. Make sure to do all the liking and subscribing and all the things that marketers usually ask you to do. Much appreciate any feedback on these sessions and yeah, we’ll bring you some more soon.
Speaker 2: Enjoy.
Speaker 1: Well, let’s get going. We’ve got three guests for the price of one today. And just to introduce them separately, our first guest is Mark Barry. Mark is the MD and VP of sales for EMEA at HubSpot. He’s worked in some of the world’s most interesting SaaS companies and has seen them through their journeys from scale up to genuine sort of industry leaders. He’s also an incredibly talented musician and painfully handsome. So you’re going to really enjoy hearing from Mark. Secondly, we have Hannah Houghton, which I haven’t said to Hannah before, but I think it’s one of my favourite names. What a great name, Hannah Houghton. She’s an absolute legend and she’s a longtime member of the community. Hannah’s situation is different to Mark’s in that she works in an agency called Genie Goals, which is around 50 people and is the person responsible for bringing in sales with both the marketing and sales hats, which she does a really great job at, by the way. And then finally, a new friend to the community is Jake. Jake is the regional sales director for the US West and Midwest regions at Redgate software. So he’s very early in the morning over in the States right now. He’s jacked up on coffee and he’s been part of the Redgate journey for the past six years, during which time Redgate has really scaled. I put it all down to the sponsorship of the marketing meetup, obviously. But again, another set of experiences in addition to some really interesting cultural things I think we can learn from being involved in a different market in the States. So you should be able to click on those or scan those QR codes if you want to follow and connect with those guys on LinkedIn. And then you can give them a little thank you afterwards. But I’m going to start with something sort of fairly simple, which relates to when I started out in sales in my 20s. It was in small companies and I was kind of given the role of marketing and sales. It was lumped together. And what I realized over the years is rarely can it be a silver bullet. Rarely can you just be a salesperson that turns up with a black book and transform the business. You need both. And marketing is also sometimes going to struggle without a good sales team there. So this is probably the most basic question, but I think it could be quite illuminating in what you consider the definition of a sales role might be. And if we start off with Mark, what does that what does that mean to you?
Speaker 3: Well, hello, James. And hello, everybody. Thanks very much for having me today. I think you I think you underestimate the complexity of that question or overestimate the simplicity of that question, how to define sales. I think if you’d asked me, I’m trying to think when I my first sales job was an auto trader in 1997. If you asked me in 1997 how to define sales, it mostly would have involved words like painful, annoying, difficult. But I think where when I think about sales today and the things that are that, you know, that define good sales processes, good sales outcomes, it is the sense of skills to discover and connect mutual value for all parties. So you have that idea where you’re understanding where the opportunity is, you’re connecting the dots between something you have and something somebody else can get value out of. And there is value for everyone in the end of that, in the end of that transaction.
Speaker 1: That’s lovely. And that feels like a very generous answer as well. That’s that’s a salesperson.
Speaker 3: I’m nothing if not giving.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I it’s funny, because I was I was told early part of my career that a really good sales director was a selfish person. And I always I always really struggled with that. Because, you know, I get it, they need to be kind of motivated. But but I love the fact that it’s a really generous way of thinking. So thank you. Thank you, Mark. Hannah, you’re you’re bridging, bridging the gap of sales and marketing. So you you kind of got both sides of the of the table on what does it what does it mean to you on an individual level?
Speaker 4: Thanks, James. And hi, everyone. It’s great to be here. It’s weird not to be on the other side and like commenting away. And I think from my perspective, firstly, I’m the least salesy salesperson you’ll probably ever meet. In the sense that when Joe first asked me if I’d come and join you today, I was thinking, well, I spend most of my time marketing, like, how dare you consider me a salesperson. But fundamentally, is my role managing the sales process from start to finish? Yes, it is. So I accept that that is a rather large part of my role. And I wouldn’t be in it today if I couldn’t do it. So I think, for me, the what is a sales what is a sales role, it’s actually a partnership nowadays, I don’t consider it primarily to be. I completely agree with what Mark said from a value exchange, like that has to be there. And that’s why for me, sales is a partnership, it is two, two entities, two people, two businesses working together to mutually achieve something that that both parties are kind of working towards or need to achieve for their own business objectives. Because we all see enough examples of businesses doing things that don’t actually help themselves. And if they’re not all working together towards the same business objective and their business objective, then the sales role hasn’t been successful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. And I think we’ll probably later on dig into how how those things are, you know, how you can part with different parts of the business. But, but Jake, you’re you’re over in the States. Thanks for thanks for joining us. You are pure sales and not a marketer by your own by your own admission. So if you’re if you’re sort of out with friends explaining, you know, what your role is, how does that what does that look like?
Speaker 5: Yep, yep. Good morning, everyone here from lovely Austin, Texas. I think I might take a much more sort of internal definition of what a sales role, maybe a bit more of a dictionary definition, which is, you know, a company hire salespeople to maximize the growth potential and to grow revenue. And so, in sales, we do that generally by interfacing with customers. So if I take a very literal sort of internal, corporate perspective of the role, I think it would be that. But the more I think about that definition, the more I realized that there’s a lot of people who don’t have sales in their title who end up being salespeople, right, the executives at our company, Red Gate end up being salespeople, because they interface with customers hoping to find mutual value and hoping to extract value. And there’s actually a lot of marketers at our company who would feel the same. So while it feels quite narrow of a definition, realistically, everyone at a company big and small is looking to to grow revenue. And so we all participate in sales in some way, shape or form, I would say.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. And I remember years ago being in a pitch and a designer who was who was quite a shy guy just started talking really passionately about his part of the business. He was there as the expert. And actually, he was probably the best person, the best salesperson in the room. And I realized at that point that my job as head of sales was just to bring the experts into the room and make sure that they were delivered. So so yeah, I really, I really like that. That’s, that’s great. And so staying with you, Jake, for you, where does where does marketing kind of stop in your organization and sales begin? And that might that’s a bit of a leading question, because it’s probably not a hard line. But are there certain responsibilities that you see as shared and certain responsibilities that aren’t? I’m just interested to see where the where the threshold is.
Speaker 5: I’m really tempted to not use the word funnel. But maybe really once. Okay, good. Okay, that’s good. That’s great. Yeah, I think, I think you could take whatever customer journey, whatever buying journey, whatever funnel that you’ve got, and you can start to, you know, like you said, there’s not a really hard, fast line that says, Okay, this is where sales, or where marketing ends on that buying journey and where sales begin, there’s definitely a gradient there in the middle. But I think, you know, the way that I partner with marketing, the way that I see marketing being really, really valuable for my team is bringing those insights from the market that we in sales might not necessarily gather, because we tend to be so a bit more micro and a bit more focused on specific customers. So I think in some ways, that’s where I might potentially draw the line where, for us in sales, we’re very much looking at this specific customer, this specific cohort of customers. And for me, in the enterprise space, I end up being quite a small number of customers, when we’re looking to sell up market. And I hopefully can bring those insights to marketers. But at the same time, like I can tend to have my head sort of close to the ground. And I look at the marketing roles and the marketing functions in our org is bringing insights to me on, hey, these are the elements of our market or customers, the macro level that you may not be aware of. And that’s super valuable when you get those things kind of working together. You’ve got something really exciting. So that’s one definition I might use off the top of my head now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. I love that. And I think, so I’ve written down two things. So one for Hannah, one for Mark. Mark, obviously, you’ve got, you’re working for HubSpot, which is a very integrated, whether you look at it as customer management, or whether you look at it as a sales tool, or, you know, inbound, outbound, it’s all kind of mixed in together. Like, does that does that really blur the lines between sales and marketing?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it does. I think like, you know, the, Jake mentioned funnel, you know, the, the, the, the inference, whenever you think about funnel is some kind of linear journey, but like that straight, you know, linear path, really hasn’t been a thing since Google, you know, became prolific, and certainly since social media became prolific. And so, you know, kind of funnel jumping is how people usually find their way to some value. And, of course, at HubSpot, we talk about the flywheel, we talk about, you know, attracting customers, engaging customers, and delighting customers. And, and nominally, you can break those into functions, you know, marketing attracts customers, sales teams engage customers, customer success teams delight customers. And there’s Chelsea raised a comment there saying, I much prefer to think about sales as customer success. Actually, I agree, selling should have a degree of customer success involved. But I see those as kind of two separate functional things. But that that wheel keeps turning rises, you attract customers, and then you engage them. And then over the lifecycle of them being customers, you delight them with more things. And then you re-engage them, re-attract them, find them in other ways that, you know, the, the, the, the way that buying and consumer behavior works today, and everything from kind of B2B consumer rights up to, or sorry, B2C consumer rights up to, you know, business to business. Companies are thinking about a lifetime relationship with buyers, they’re not thinking about this, I think, as a transaction. And so that kind of funnel idea of attract something, sell something, and then end is, is outmoded. It’s, it’s a continuum, I think.
Speaker 1: And that actually tees me up beautifully for the question that I was going to ask Hannah. Presumably, Hannah, relationships are a huge part of the success of, you know, working in an agency. And how does that, you know, do you find that marketing still needs to happen with your current customers? So, you know, you’ve marketed to gain a customer, sales have taken over, they’ve won, is there, is there this bit afterwards, where you’re both kind of playing with the, with, you know, playing with the customer, but, you know, engaging with the customer?
Speaker 4: 100%. I think relationship, I mean, in our world, relationship building is what creates sales. If there is no relationship building of any description, then we would have no sales, because our business is based off building, as Mark just said, those long term relationships, it’s based off that, ensuring that we have that connection, that engagement with a brand. I think if we switched off the moment it entered the sales process, quite honestly, they probably wouldn’t continue talking to us because the reason they engage with us is to get more than what their account team are doing. The account team delivering is, of course, the most fundamental part as to why they’re with us. But we live in a really customer centric world. And so even though we’re, you know, a B2B agency, the customer being first in all of those scenarios means that the customer needs to get exactly what they want. And that isn’t always straightforward account management for the challenge or the problem that they have in front of them today. It’s about pulling in those industry insights, it’s about finding the benchmarks, it’s about them, us being there to preempt what we think is going to come next for them. And that isn’t necessarily happening in like a weekly client management that’s happening, as like a newsletter that’s happening with content we’re putting out there, because they want to know that we understand our industry better than anybody else. They want to think that, okay, we’re, we’re in good hands, we’re with people who really, no one, no offence to any PPC people on the call, but like, no one wants to know all the ins and outs of how something technically works. They want to rely in our world on the agency to know that and therefore, we have to constantly prove that we do know that and that we’re ahead of it in order to be able to deliver. And I think if they didn’t see that, they might question, they might question us more, the conversation, the relationship wouldn’t be as healthy as we would like.
Speaker 1: And like from, from personal experience, having, having worked in a similar size agency to yourself, the I always used to see it when customers came into the building, it was like one of the most exciting parts of their week, you know, they weren’t necessarily marketers themselves, they might be business owners, but coming in and talking to a marketing agency about new stuff, you know, it was it was really exciting. And so, yeah, I think keeping that that level of excitement there is, is key. And I’m intrigued to know, and feel free to shout your favourites out. But have you ever seen sort of really successful ways that salespeople people have sort of fed information back to back to marketers? And have you? Have you worked with particularly good marketers in the past that have done done certain things? And maybe maybe start with you, Jake, if you if you’ve got a marketer on your team that you’re like, yes, that guy or gal is is my go to? Or have you found that you’ve by feeding certain certain stuff back, that you’ve, you’ve had real success?
Speaker 5: You know, I think I think one thing that I can be really honest about as a salesperson is that we tend to be prisoners of the moment in some way. So we get off a customer call, we hear something described in a certain way from that customer’s POV. And that feels like the most important thing in that moment, where, you know, that could just be sort of sort of short term mindset. So I think the, the best marketers that I’ve worked with, you know, they’re very willing to listen as that feedback sort of organically comes through, and sometimes comes through and fits and spurts, depending on what’s going on, and at any given moment. But I think the best marketers that I’ve worked with are the ones that are able to really contextualize that, right, they’re able to take that feedback and say, Okay, I might not, you know, take immediate action on this, but I’m definitely going to listen to this. And I’m definitely going to apply what I’m hearing you say to everything else that I’m hearing, and see, you know, you know, and tailor some kind of insight for you. So, again, maybe this isn’t really fair. But oftentimes, I lean on our marketing resources to be the folks that will listen to me, or my rep sort of ramble on about something and say, Okay, this is what I actually heard you say, this is what I how I think this applies in the in this context. And this is what we’re going to do about it. And I think the, we have a regional marketing team here at Redgate. So it’s a, we’re a UK based company. I’m here in the US, obviously working with these US customers, but we have US marketers here working with our US sales teams. And I think they do a really, really, really great job of this. And we don’t make it easy on them. But that’s definitely one of the big value adds.
Speaker 1: That’s, that’s really interesting. And do you find a difference between your US sales and US marketing team and the UK and sales and marketing teams? Like, do they, do they do the same thing I listen, but then have to come up with completely different sort of regionalized approaches?
Speaker 5: 100%. And I think that’s the big challenge for, I think, a company the size of Redgate, and how we want to scale going forward, you know, we have, we obviously need to have a standardized message, how we’re approaching the global market, and how we want everyone to think of us, but we have to be really agile in these regions, you know, going into the US market is going to be very, very different than going into, you know, the European market or the East Asian market, right? The maturity or their propensity to buy your products, and on top of all the localization stuff. So I think, I think we’re, we’re on that journey now, as we scale globally, and trying to figure out how do we take the standardized company message, but make sure it gets applied to these markets. And look, I’ll be honest, it’s really challenging. But getting that right is really satisfying. And I think it’s an important lever for growth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s really cool. And okay, so, Mark, you’ve got a bunch of experience in, you know, from, as I said, at the beginning, from scale up to, to sort of big, big companies like HubSpot. And there’s a lot of terms and a lot of things that, you know, create pressure in a salesperson’s life, whether that’s leads, revenue, profit, you know, what are the main things that marketers need to be most aware of in a salesperson’s job, do you think that that’s going to create empathy between the between the two?
Speaker 3: Um, I think you covered quite a few of them, just even with some of those headlines, you know, the sales, the job, I mean, aside from philosophically, my aspiration is all salespeople that, you know, work in, in our organization, you know, think of the customer first, they think of the company next, they think of themselves next after that. Um, that they’re, they’re, you know, putting their best foot forward and doing their very best work, and they’re here to learn and, you know, and do the best work of their career. And it’s important, I think, to have those aspirations. At the end of the day, though, that person also carries a target, they’re getting paid on that target, you know, how they fulfill that target will be through a combination of, of leads that are created by demand sources like marketing. Or partners, or maybe a business development team, and also leads that they generate for themselves. And I think just for marketers to understand, okay, well, how does a sales person or a sales team be successful? And if part of their success is attracting customers, you know, for them to for them to serve? Are we looking at the same things? Are we looking at customers in the same way? Are we telling the same story? As we go as we go out to out to those customers. And I think the there are, you know, these are really simple shortcuts, it doesn’t matter the size of your organization, whether you are the sole marketeer in your company, or you’re a product marketer in a 500 person marketing organization that also has regional marketing, customer marketing, you know, partner marketing, etc. The shortcut to knowing, not just how to help sales, helping sales is a shortcut for a shorthand for helping customers. The shortcut to do that is, number one, talk to customers. So actually make time in your calendar every week to talk to customers that could be, you know, events that you attend, it could be calls that you set up with existing customers, it could be calls that you set up with, with prospects that you like. It could be calls that you lost that the company lost and understand what it is that those customers and prospects actually care about. And the second shortcut, which is also really easy, is go to a sales forecast meeting and be part of that meeting every week. And again, most sales organization or organizations, you know, the sales part of that organization will have a forecasting rhythm, because that’s how they, you know, structure the governance around the business. It’s not how many they’re going to make, it’s how they understand how many customers they have, or how many customers they’re winning, how many customers they’re losing. Marketing is a critical component to that story. And marketing can learn a ton of, you know, how the business is operating just by being part of that meeting. So talk to customers, go to sales forecast meetings.
Speaker 1: I love that. I love that. And apologies if my mics, is that better if I move my mic a little bit closer? I’m a bit quiet, apparently. And I really love that. It’s sort of giving people a seat at the table. You know, marketers actually being in a room where they’re not just talking about marketing is, is so important. And it’s something
Speaker 3: I will say it’s not, it’s not like a seat, you know, in the corner observing. It’s a hot seat. But there’s no, and I, you know, again, Jake and Hannah, you know, this might resonate with you guys as well. There’s nothing worse, I think, as a stakeholder, you know, finding out from some other stakeholder that you’re, you’re letting the side down, or you’re not delivering the thing that you’re supposed to deliver. But how can you know that if you’re not part of the conversation, you know, and so being part of the conversation in the first place, you know, shortcuts, some of those frictions and frustrations, and, and then everybody can do better work together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s so hard for marketers to sort of sit outside of those, those big meetings, if you like, and then come in with an idea, just to present your idea and then disappear again, because you’re missing out on the context in which you’re trying to the problems you’re trying to trying to solve. And Hannah, is that is that something that happens within, you know, I mean, obviously, you’ve got sales and marketing for yourself, but presumably, you’re looking at sales targets, and then looking backwards again, right? And how can we improve those through through marketing? Is that presumably, you already have that seat? And that’s quite important.
Speaker 4: 100%. But I think that there’s a couple of like important pieces. The first one is around, we have a finite resource, we’re an SME, you know, we’re not a business that is able to pull in resource from all over the place. And therefore, we have X amount of resource at any period, and we can only sell as much as the resource we have. And realistically, you know, we, it feels like at the moment, we look at that all the time. But in less busy periods, you know, we might look at that on a monthly basis, we might look on a quarterly basis, to forecast to understand what resource is it that we need down the line. But realistically, our marketing has to ensure it delivers them. That’s, you know, in over the last couple of years, I think a lot of agencies will say that it’s been quite a rocky time, it’s been quite challenging. And therefore, everything we’ve done as a business has focused on demand is focused on driving as much demand as we can. And therefore, we’ve now got to flip things on their head and almost not slow the sales pipeline down, because we definitely don’t ever want to do that. That’s the sales person’s worst nightmare. But we’ve got to manage it. And we’ve got to make sure that when we get to the end of this period, and we’ve recruited and our resources back up, that we can continue to move that wheel and we can continue to go along. So I think that’s a really important one for us to have as an entire team. That’s not just sales, that’s not just marketing, that is everybody has to work together on it. And I think the other element is, when I look at, you know, what our sales function is, if you like, it is effectively, we are just starting that relationship. You know, the salesperson is in on that customer’s journey for a very short period of their lifetime with us. And therefore, my job is to amplify the team. It’s not about me. As a salesperson, my job is to, you articulated it quite well earlier, actually, when you said, you’re not the expert in the room. I’m never the expert in the room. And I’m quite happy with that. I can default to the experts in the room to give you for them to have that voice. So I think, while I can tell you what we can do, I’m a glorified project manager, right, I can tell you what we can do within that time. But fundamentally, this is the team that’s going to deliver it for you. And actually, that’s the team that you need to hear from and build that long term relationship with. I’m always there if you’ve got a problem. But why talk to me when you can talk directly to them?
Speaker 1: And I think it’s probably as a two or three person business, you are sales, marketing and the expert. But as these things start to scale, so that salesperson becomes less of an expert and more of a this is what my team is telling me type of thing. Yeah, that’s super interesting. On the terms that we were touched on earlier, Jake, the things like profit and revenue and net profit, gross profit, all those sort of things, do you find that there’s certain things that the marketers don’t always grasp and ones that you think are really, really important terms, whether it’s acronyms? We’re classic in marketing for checking an acronym around. But are there are there things that that you think would really help from a from a sales point of view, you know, that a layperson might not not necessarily know about in sales?
Speaker 5: I think, I think less so some of those financial terms that you mentioned there, I think, I think most companies, maybe, maybe not startups necessarily startups are just getting their heads around this, but certainly midsize and larger companies. Most sales forces work within a qualification mechanism or a qualification model. It’s a model that salespeople use when they’re actually interfacing with customers to, you know, qualify that customer and see if they’re a good fit to purchase the product and to go through a selling motion or a buyer’s journey. And so there’s loads of these out there. There’s, you know, way back when there was an acronym called BANT, which is sort of come out of favor now. I think what’s really popular is the med pick or medic methodology, which is something that we use here at Red Gate. And these are just acronyms, I’m not going to explain them all you can go and look them up. But I think that is one of the best ways for a marketer to crawl inside the head of a salesperson and really get a sense of what they’re doing day to day is to get a sense of how that salesperson is trying to qualify what that salesperson’s definition of a qualified And again, a lot of companies have this defined for their sales orgs. And it’s a methodology that’s standardized across the teams. I think that’s been really, really helpful for the alignment between those two functions here at Red Gate is making sure that we’re clear with each other on this is what we think a good customer is when it reaches that stage of the funnel.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And have there been points, Jake, that so you obviously you’ve you’ve been with the company for quite a number of years. Did you did you see like a big as the company grew? Did you see a big sort of shift in the way that in terms of the dial in terms of how sales and marketing work together from like the early days to where you are now? Is there anything that kind of stood out?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think absolutely. I think when I started at Red Gate, we had, you know, our go to market teams were pretty simple, if I’m being honest, I was an entry level salesperson. And I had leads. And there was a report in our CRM for leads. And I called those leads. And hopefully I can sell them software. And we had a marketing team that hopefully generate a bunch of leads. Now, you know, there’s so much technology available to us. And there’s, you know, there’s so many different ways to qualify a lead. That things have certainly gotten more complex, I think, for the better, though. And especially as Red Gate as a company, we view our growth, not just as selling as much software to as many people as possible, although that is the goal. Now we view our growth through the lens of, okay, how do we penetrate this market? Or how do we approach this cohort of customers? How do we grow in the mid market? How do we grow in the enterprise? And so I think when you talk about those dials, I think we’ve moved from maybe one or two dials to, you know, four or five or six or seven or eight. And that I think we’ve gone through some growing pains and figuring out, okay, how do we contextualize all of these together, but it sharpens our go to market motion for the particular set of customers we’re trying to go after. And I think that’s been really helpful as we grow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And so so looking at the sort of earlier stages, if you like, with you, Hannah, like in a smaller, smaller company, like wearing two hats is hard. Like, how do you how do you keep the balance between the two? Like there’s pressure from there’s pressure for both, right? Like, what’s the what is your sort of typical working week look like? And you know, how do you how do you become not just marketing or not just sales?
Speaker 4: I think it is that piece around ensuring that you have demand. It’s it’s ensuring that that demand is always there. And that is always churning. And whether that is through new activity, like we have to have an always on. And we, you know, it’s tried and tested, and we’re baby split. And we’ve we’ve run multiple different campaigns to understand what activity do we need to always run. And therefore, we know that that will bring in this base level of sales activity. And then as and when required to the guy’s points, we pull the levers when we know that we’ve got extra resource when we know we’re coming into peak like agency world is weird in paid services is weirdly very seasonal. And therefore, we know when we need to be not doubling down on sales, because it’s not doubling down. But I know when I’m going to have the majority of my week bookmarked to pitches to sales to working on that side of things versus the marketing. And therefore, it’s rather than a weekly basis, it’s more managing your calendar on a like seasonal basis and monthly basis to be like, okay, it’s now the summer holidays. Sales people hate the summer holidays, because everyone goes on holiday and everything pauses, what can I do in this time period to maximize my time, and make sure that we have everything planned and scheduled for the next three months, because all of a sudden, everyone’s going to come back from holiday, they’re going to realize we’re in peak, and they’re going to freak out, and I’m going to get loads of phone calls. That’s not being arrogant, that is just the nature of the sales cycle. And therefore, we need to make sure that we’ve got those things. So it’s not necessarily like managing them on a daily basis. But inevitably, cash is king.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And it’s one of those things like when I first started my own agency, it was like, you win two or three customers, you’re like, yay, brilliant, I’m really good. And now I’m going to be an operator, or I’m going to, you know, and you sometimes forget that actually, some of those customers could disappear. And you need some more, you know, talking about going back to the funnel, it’s always having your eye on the next slot coming in to make sure that you’ve got somebody to slot in as your next customer sort of thing. So yeah, super, super interesting. And then one more question to you, Mark, before we go, we’ve got a bunch of questions in the Q&A. You’ve worked in some of the most successful companies. And what sort of characteristics, what has characterized some of the best sort of sales operations and sales people that you’ve been around as the North Star of where everybody wants to get when they all get to the size of HubSpot?
Speaker 3: Um, I think, so, characteristics of really great sales people. Yeah. I think that, you know, the idea that sales is innate, and you know, finger guns, you know, you either have it or you don’t, like, that’s rubbish, you know, it’s a skill, it can be taught, it can be mastered, and it can be developed, and you’re continually learning and re-skilling. And developing and adapting to different situations. Also, by the way, every single person, no matter what you do in life, you’re always selling something to somebody, you know, you’re selling, you know, I had to, you know, sell the idea to my kids to wash the dishes last night, you know, in exchange for something else. So, that kind of making a connection and describing value, that is the innate thing, but the skill that comes around selling to people where previously, and my career is long enough to know that, okay, here’s the playbook of how you start a conversation where you want to sell somebody and you go to this next stage and this next stage. Jake mentioned earlier, the buyer journey, you know, we need to stop kidding ourselves that actually it’s not about what we want to sell, it’s what people want to buy, you know, and so, so the best salespeople are those, in my view, are those that are willing to adapt, that are like, you know, lifelong learners, voracious learners, actually, where they always want to learn new stuff and do new stuff and have that kind of intellectual curiosity, again, about somebody else’s challenges, not just their own challenges, you know, the kind of coin-operated salesperson is a thing, but it’s not the most successful example of modern selling, in my view. I think when it comes to structuring sales, back to that idea that you don’t just happen into sales, and sorry, I should say, don’t get me wrong, like when I started at Stripe, the sales team, the sales team at Stripe was, you know, a handful of folks that had, that had developed out of the customer success or support organization who, where people started asking for more stuff and, you know, different features, and so we kind of turned some of those folks towards selling. But the best seller in Stripe when I started by, you know, by career was Michelin star chef. This is not like somebody who went into sales career, they just kind of grew up into us, but at a certain point, you have to get to having structure, you know, having rigor, having enablement, like a sales methodology, again, Jake mentioned earlier, you know, like, you know, a governance around forecasting. Those are the kinds of things that, again, you know, sound quite, you know, drastic and, and quite rigid. And guess what they are, you know, you need to have some predictability in your sales. And so you balance this kind of intellectual curiosity, creative, creativity, lifeline, long learning with the ability to organize oneself around a methodology to run a buying process. Essentially, that’s, those I think are the characteristics of the more successful sales organizations that I’ve worked in. And finally, as well, and it probably sounds a little bit cliche, but it has to be fun. Like, it has to be enjoyable, if it’s always a slog. And like, it’s tough out there, folks, everyone knows it, you know, but if it’s always about how tough it is, you lose good people, you lose your own energy, customers feel that. So, you know, has to be, has to be enjoyable.
Speaker 1: I think, I think Hannah’s got a point on personality. So I’ll come on to you in a second. But just on that point, when I was head of sales, the days where I would always win the big contracts were the ones where I was just being silly with the person that I was with. And we were almost giggling when we came into the room where we weren’t almost taking the situation, you know, too, too seriously. And people would see that you are having fun. And I think if you can market yourself as a brand that’s enjoying itself, and you know, those bits of communication are that you’re having fun, then people want to be part of that journey. But Hannah, you dropped me a message about personality. Like, what’s, how do you feel that fits in?
Speaker 4: I think Mark’s right. Salespeople are humans too. And I think that like, one of the things that really frustrates me is when, and it’s funny, because Joe actually said it on his email about today’s event. He said, salespeople, ooh, like, it’s almost like the moment you hear the sales word, you’re like, oh, not sure about them. Greasy, slimy car salesman, like there’s almost like an almost a visceral reaction that people have when they hear that. But actually, salespeople are just like everybody else. And I think one of the things that a really good salesperson can do, or that I see from my side, is someone who can speak to someone for 15 minutes and understand that person, as in whether it use like an insight profile or a disc profile, like whatever your personality matching scheme is, like being able to identify who it is you’re talking to, and therefore how they want to be spoken to, is like the most important element. And you have to do it quite quickly. And it is a skill that you learn over time. It’s definitely not that innate thing that you just wake up one day, and you’re like, this is what this like, you have to listen for the key elements, but being able to understand who it is you’re talking to, and therefore how they want to be spoken to, is what will either make that conversation a really nice experience for that customer or not such a nice experience, and they’ll probably leave and go elsewhere because you’ve got to get them. And I would say the same privilege should be afforded to sales teams, just because they are a salesperson does not mean they are a particular type of person, like get to know your sales team and actually how is it that they are as individuals, because everybody is motivated by slightly different things.
Speaker 1: I love that. And actually, you could have been talking about a marketer there, when you’re saying like, you’ve got to listen to your customer and you’ve got to react to the things that they want and position, you know, it’s a marketing and it’s a sales sort of approach, which I love. So we really should get on to some questions from the community. I’ve been being very selfish asking you all the ones I wanted to hear. First one that we’ve got that’s had the most upvotes, and make sure in the Q&A, folks, if you go in and give a little thumbs up, we’ll answer those ones first. Alice, and I’m going to come to you, Jake, on this one, has said, what annoys you the most about marketing teams, e.g., something you wish they didn’t do, did more of, or understood more?
Speaker 5: Really on the spot with this one. I think I’ve referenced this a couple times. I think there’s a lot of data that can be used to describe, you know, the inputs and outputs of a marketing function. I think I can sit down with some marketing teams and there’s just a variety of data points. And I wouldn’t say this annoys me per se, but I find the question that I ask most often is, can you contextualize this for me? So there’s all this information about what’s going well, what’s not going well. This is where these customers are at, but this is where these, you know, there’s lots of, and that’s all good stuff. But ultimately, what’s most helpful for me is, can we distill that down into something that doesn’t have to be actionable immediately, but, you know, there needs to be a so what statement at some point there. Again, I would not say this annoys me because this is really, really hard. I think this is a challenge. But that is, again, the question I find myself asking some of these teams the most. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that’s great because we all live in our own world, right? And if a campaign has reached X amount of people and there’s a bit like, what does that mean to you as a salesperson? You know, it’s like, what do these numbers mean? I think that’s a really valuable piece of advice. Thank you. Thank you for that. We’ve got a question here from Megan saying, how do you report on campaign attribution slash influence? We’re currently looking at the best way to do this. Mark, I guess you’re the man with the tools. How is that best reported?
Speaker 4: I was literally going to say, by the way, we use HubSpot. So I’m going to defer the question to Mark. No pressure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we use HubSpot. I mean, you know, jokes aside, pitch aside, you know, there are tools that do this. I think, though, the what’s really important is that it’s an iterative process. You know, every campaign is going to be different, even if the copy is the same and the audience you think is the same. And maybe the time of year is the same time you ran that same copy last year. There’s going to be something that makes it different. And so you need to be really clear on what are the signals that you consider to be important in attributing value. The way that I think about as a as a as a the owner of, if you like, of the customer experience and as the owner of revenue generation from those any campaign that we decide to do is an investment. And so I’m instantly going to look for a return on that investment. And I’ll have in my head a range at which I think that return on investment is acceptable. And so I might be fine with us, you know, tapping out on ROAS if we are seeing net new audiences coming into, you know, coming into the funnel or into the flywheel. Whereas I might not be so prepared to do that if we’re already tapped out or saturated in the particular in a particular market. So I think don’t assume that how you attribute value for every campaign is going to land the same way for whoever is owning the revenue at the end of that.
Speaker 1: And I guess there’s there’s certain certain campaigns that will surprise you in terms of their outcomes. So you kind of go, well, the idea was this was going to be an acquisition campaign, but actually it’s worked beautifully as a brand campaign or vice versa. So, yeah, that’s a that’s a great answer. And Zara asks, we have a very separate marketing and sales team. Do you have any tips of how we can increase communications between them? I’m probably going to go back to you, Jake, on this one, because you’ve probably got the most separate. Like, are you guys on Slack? Is it weekly emails? Are you in the same room? Like, what’s the best way that you think marketers can can connect properly with with salespeople?
Speaker 5: I think of those three things that you mentioned, you know, it’s in the reverse order of effectiveness. So Slack is a wonderful tool, especially for geographically dispersed teams. Same with email as needed. But I think we really do find that getting these teams in the room together talking about the same things together has a massive impact. That’s a really, really easy answer. Maybe a lazy answer in a way. It’s like, oh, just get these people together and talk. I think the caveat there is you need a really strong leader, a pretty strong leader to facilitate those conversations effectively. But more often than not, finding a mechanism or a medium to bring these teams together and finding ways to make sure that they have mutual interest or shared interest and having conversations around those, you know, plants the seed and puts fertilizer on the ground that is going to, you know, create some awesome things down the road. So you can just get that started in that way. I think you’ll be surprised at how effective things turn out in the long term.
Speaker 1: We Joe and I went to we’ve made it made a video that’s on our YouTube channel where we went and interviewed the head of marketing for Canva in Europe. And she was telling us about how there’s a mandatory lunch break in their office where they all have to take lunch. And every day there is a meal cooked from a different country in the world. So there’s like an on-site chef there and everybody comes together and breaks bread and and and chats. And so you’ve got all these different departments every day chatting and building friendships and learning from each other. And my my hunch is that that’s incredibly effective for a company. You know, certainly as as they get bigger, it becomes harder. Right. And things become more siloed. But, yeah, just sometimes just sitting down and having a couple with someone can be can be really effective. Right. So I think I think it’s it’s it’s pretty critical, actually.
Speaker 3: Again, in the pre-COVID days back in my my time at Stripe, one of the like the company was so intentional and so thoughtful about creating connection across all teams that it had physically set up the office in that way. So in the lunchroom, there were no like small tables or breakouts. It was all long tables and benches. And so you had to, you know, you kind of potluck who you were sitting next to. And that would create some conversations and founders and the exec team and all that would just kind of randomly jump on your table someday and start a conversation. So so that was one. The other was all of the teams sat together on, you know, in most of the offices anyway. They were relatively like open plan. And so all of the teams, the desks were all, you know, you know, in the same area. So I’m sitting next to marketing and there’s apps over there and product over there. And even as the company scales, I joined it when it was 300 people. It was 8000 people when I left. And as the company scales, if your team was bigger than 26 people, you had to break up your team and and only have that number of people in one location to make sure there was space for other teams to be there as well. So there are like intentional things you do. But the challenge in the hybrid world is like what what what those kind of physical things allowed was the serendipitous conversations that you don’t get when you schedule a marketing meeting or schedule a forecast call or something like that. So you miss all of that serendipity. And so you have to intentionally try and create artificial ways to have serendipitous moments. And so part of it is not, in my view, anyway, it’s not just about how well we use Slack or how well we use Zoom, but are we creating moments that are not just about the work and maybe just a little bit about learning from each other and meeting other people, lunch and learns, whatever it might be. But but creating those social engagements where people just get to, you know, meet and like Hannah and then maybe be curious to learn more about what Hannah does.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly that. It’s funny. One of our one of our partners, Frontify, we’ve we’ve been building this really lovely relationship with Annika there. And she asked me to be on a panel at an event down in London. And just just being in the same room. Like, I just feel the the connection so much stronger now from from being able to sort of chat with her and, you know, understand her better as a person, you know, because we have these little windows, don’t we? In Zoom meetings where it’s like, oh, there’s 45 minutes to do everything we need to do. And so, yeah, I I think it’s great that, you know, you have to find creative ways, don’t you, to to get in the same room as people. We’ve only got six minutes left. Goodness me. We’ve got a question from an anonymous person saying we find it really difficult to get everyone aligned. We have regular communication. We really struggle to get sales to particularly utilize the information we provide to help really personalize the content. We’ve tried so many things and never seem to get that alignment. Any tips would be great. I think we’re kind of touching on a similar a similar topic here, but but specifically the the the information that’s being passed over to personalize content. How do you like how do you how do you sort of crack that nut?
Speaker 4: I’d be really interested why, like if they’re not willing to use it, why is it that they’re not willing to use it? Like there’s got to be an underlying reason. And I think sometimes there’s a disconnect between what salespeople hear on calls and what marketing material is created. Like, I mean, to be honest, if it was me, I’d go back to a really basic level in terms of like, what is the challenge that the the what is the challenge that the consumer is having or the point of contact is having? And therefore, your marketing should be addressing those challenges. And if they’re not addressing those challenges, is that why they’re not using it? Or like salespeople are generally pretty resourceful and they’re going to do everything within their, you know, they are often commission driven. They are often people who really, you know, have a high drive to get those numbers. If they’re not using it, there must be a reason they wouldn’t waste a material. And it could it could simply be understanding like there’s you almost need to unpick that a little bit further to kind of understand why she’s asking the question, because like, is it a particularly complicated industry whereby that’s why they’re not using it because it’s too much detail? I’d like to know a little bit more, which sounds really far say question.
Speaker 1: I wonder whether it comes back to what you were saying, Jake, where it was like contextualising things, you know, if a marketing team is coming up with wonderful information, but the sales team go, I don’t know what to do with this. Then, you know, if you can help put it into their language.
Speaker 5: Certainly. And I think I would plus one everything Hannah said there. I think that’s that’s really, really insightful. I can say salespeople are provided a lot of materials and a lot of resources. Right. I think, you know, and most companies, everyone knows that that, you know, do be having a sales role is hard being on a sales team is hard. And so they want to provide all these resources, but it is possible to oversaturate. And so that element of contextualisation I think is really important. I think especially at a company where there’s lots of different marketing teams that create lots of different pieces of content or collateral. I think it behooves those organizations to have a few folks say okay let’s look at all this stuff is all this play well together does this all make sense together does the salesperson can they look at all of this content and know what they should be using and when. So I think there is a volume element at play sometimes as well. That’s not going to be true of all companies but but I’ve seen it happen before.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. And there’s a there’s a question that was actually something I wrote down that I think overlaps to do with training. So we’ve got a question about somebody that works in a very small company, and they say their marketing role absorbs some of the sales functions, which I think is probably quite common this is this is Hannah’s world, and is looking for any recommendations for some good basic training in sales. Mark I guess you got some resources, which, if you wanted to send them over we could include them in the in the email afterwards, I know HubSpot has a has a wonderful sort of training platform that I’m right thinking is free is that right Mark. Yeah, that’s free. Okay, so we could we could probably hook you up with some, some stuff there but the things that I wrote down is people love a good book or a good email newsletter or good resource like have any of you, and this is open, maybe start with you Hannah is there is there anything that you’ve read or that you follow that you’re like, ah, that particular thing really helps me when it comes to understanding the relationship and understanding sales.
Speaker 4: Um, to, to be honest, I’m maybe this isn’t my own fault, I, there’s a couple, there is actually a company called six cents, who have written a book called no more, no more cold calls or forms or sales I really rate that as like an approach to sales I think it is probably the direction in which the industry of b2b sales is moving to some degree and I think most of their resources are free and their websites really good. But I would also probably just be looking for what type of approach you want to have, as in, I would, Jake mentioned some earlier like there’s a number of different sales approaches you can have and they’re all quite different. If I was you I’d be looking, researching those specific areas and finding out which one aligns with us best, like, being an account based agency, we’re inevitably going to be looking more towards the customer centric kind of model and what can we do everything around that customer, but depending on what you’re offering depends on different so I would, I would, there’s different cults, it’s which cult you want to join.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that’s cool. And any any resources from from you to or should we include it in the, in the follow up email. Oh look at that mark what a pro. He’s already got the link in the chat.
Speaker 5: I will. I’ve used some of these HubSpot, maybe not these ones but some HubSpot resources before and they are good so I’ll give a plus one there.
Speaker 1: Just for clarity this webinar was not sponsored by HubSpot, but we use it as well and we absolutely love it so so yeah highly recommend that you, you click that link.
Speaker 5: My, my last rec, my Bible is this book called Spin Selling which was written decades ago by Neil Rackham, and I think it still holds true, anytime I hire a new salesperson and they have never sold before I have them read that book, just a recommendation to.
Speaker 1: That’s great. That’s really good. I love that. Well look, we are, we are at time, and I’m just going to if you put that out there these are these are the three people that have been giving you all the wisdom today. And we really appreciate everything that you’ve that you’ve done and delivered. There’s still a bunch of open questions out there. That’s exclaimers resources. Next week we have, this is a series of talks around departments that that aren’t necessarily marketing. And so next week we’ve got Ryan Lisk who’s the founder of hybrid legal and Vinay Parma who’s the founder of Druva Start so we’re talking legal and customer success. So, so that would be, that’d be wonderfully if you could join us next Tuesday. And again, we really appreciate all of you for joining today and and thank you all three of you for your, your time and your wisdom, and, and yeah, we will, we will see you next week. Thanks folks. Thank you. Cheers.