Centricity - SoundSage

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In this episode of the Centricity podcast, our host, Will Riley, meets with Eddie Yoon, one of the authors of The 22 Laws of Category Design: Name & Claim Your Niche, Share Your POV, And Move The World From Where It Is To Somewhere Different. They talk about the ultimate business strategy - category design - which uses a passion for change and the need to upend the status quo to drive innovation and growth.

Category Design - The Ultimate Strategy

Instead of competing against other businesses or trying to come out at the top of your field, category design is about competing against the status quo.
Companies that subscribe to a “Be Different” mentality grow quickly, but many are too risk-averse to go in this direction.
Leaders in these businesses care deeply about their products and believe in what the company produces - they’re frustrated by current societal standards and want to create change.

Types of Category Designers

Accidental designers are those who create something great that explodes but don’t know why and can’t replicate their success.
Serial designers are innovators who consistently create successful products that they support and care about.

Resources

Reach out to Eddie via email at eddie@eddiewouldgrow.com

Follow Eddie on Twitter @eddiewouldgrow

The 22 Laws of Category Design by Category Pirates, Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, Katrina Kirsch, Nicolas Cole - pick it up on Amazon

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In this episode of the Centricity podcast, our host Will Riley meets with Jeremy Miner, author of The New Model of Selling: Selling to an Unsellable Generation. They discuss meeting new challenges as a seller

It’s Time For Sellers to Adapt

More than ever before, consumers have access to plenty of information about all of the products people are trying to sell to them. They no longer need a salesperson to be their consultant.
It’s good to learn about foundational elements of sales from older books, but they focus on “transactional selling,” which is less and less relevant.
Prospects are used to being sold to. When they hear “salesy” talk, they shut down - sellers need to build actual trust with prospects through tonality and asking the right questions.

Moving Beyond Logic

When a seller seems aggressive or desperate, prospects shut down. Using different tones and facial expressions, you can open them up.
Prospects are predisposed to say “no” when you start selling to them. Ask them questions like, “Are you opposed to discussing this further?” Make the ‘no’ work for you!
Stay away from surface-level questions if you are interested in deeper answers.

Resources

SalesRevolution.pro

To dig deeper into these topics and many more, pick up a copy of The New Model of Selling: Selling to an Unsellable Generation by Jeremy Miner and Jerry Acuff on BarnesandNoble.com.

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In this episode of the Centricity podcast, our host Will Riley meets with Connor Jeffers, the founder and CEO of Aptitude 8 and hapily. They dig deep into digital systems and get specific about finding a tech stack that finds a balance between sophistication and efficiency.

Choosing a Solution

Consultative sellers have to understand the pain and needs of the companies they’re working with, because buyers may not exactly know the terminology for what they actually want.
A8 helps customers create what they want to build, and then they build it. On the other hand, hapily offers standard functionality and if you have needs beyond that, you will need to seek them elsewhere.

Independent Software Vendor vs Systems Integrator

Aptitude 8, for all intents and purposes, an integrator. While they can create a setup entirely through HubSpot, but they do end up integrating, especially for larger companies.
Security-wise, they have access to a lot of data. They have systems in place to ensure that data is safe.
When working with big organizations, there is a responsibility to ensure that the new systems work better than the original. There is a lot of risk involved for the organization.

Takeaways About Sales/Marketing

Learn about relational databases, software models, etc. to ramp up your understanding of what you’re selling in general.
Get educated on APIs. You don’t necessarily need to be a coder to have a basic grasp on what an API is!

Resources

Connect with Connor Jeffers on LinkedIn

Aptitude8.com

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In this episode of the Centricity podcast, our host Sean Doyle meets with Cecilia Lang Ree, the Senior Product Manager at Biolinq. They discuss applying behavior science to create more effective, successful marketing strategies.

Why Apply Behavior Science to Marketing?

This gives marketing professionals a science-based framework to start from when creating profiles of their prospects rather than relying on trial and error.
People are often motivated by unconscious factors – even if you’re surveying them and getting responses, they may not be able to tell you a complete picture of what they’re experiencing and why.
The transtheoretical model maps out how people experience changes in behavior. Marketers need to be familiar with the stages of behavior change in order to have targeted techniques throughout the buyer journey.

The Bridge Between Awareness and Action

Awareness is not enough to change people’s behavior.
Understanding intrinsic motivation can help us develop a step-by-step process that can take someone from knowing about your product to choosing to purchase.

Getting Started

Get excited about the science. Learn it and teach it to anyone who is interested.
Cecilia lists some of her favorite resources - see below!

Resources

Connect with Cecilia Lang-Ree on LinkedIn!

What Your Customer Wants and Can’t Tell You by Melina Palmer

Using Behavioral Science in Marketing by Nancy Harhut

Start at the End by Matt Wallaert

Changing for Good by James O. Prochaska

BehavioralScientists.org

Irrational Labs

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In this episode of The Centricity Podcast, our host Will Riley has Joseph Seo back on the podcast to discuss 5 AI you don’t know about (yet). Seo is the Principal Co-founder at Visual Lime Creative and Revenue Operations Specialist at Fitzmartin. Listen to their episode, “ChatGPT for B2B”, if you’d like to hear more from Will and Joseph!

Chatbots

ChatBots are becoming more intuitive. While they can’t replace support teams, they are great for triaging support needs.
Fitzmartin uses Chatspot.ai by Hubspot.

Copywriting Support

Seo recommends trying ChatGPT-4, Writer, and Jasper. The differences are mostly about UI, so it’s worth testing them to see what works for you.
Even though these writing tools can’t hold a candle to human creativity and writing quality, they are great for getting your process started.

Audio/Video

Midjourney has plenty of casual applications, but Seo doesn’t use it for business.
AdCreative.ai is more business-relevant. Use this for high-quality ads.

Resources

Follow Fitzmartin on LinkedIn so you never miss an episode with Joe!

For more on AI, listen to Joe and Will’s episode “ChatGPT for B2B”

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In this episode of The Centricity Podcast, our host Sean Doyle meets with Timothy Hughes to discuss the power of social selling. Hughes is the author of Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers, and he creates regular content for his 32,000 LinkedIn followers. Listen in to hear how social selling can impact your organization and your sales team.

Social Selling

Use your presence on social media to build relationships, start conversations, and create commercial interactions. Social selling is NOT predictable pitching!
Many buyers are immune to pitching – to them, it’s all spam. They are more likely to be interested in connecting and working with the right people.
Tim’s social selling methods are seeing a 9% response rate from prospects and a 33.6% rate of prospects moving on to the next steps.

Human Content

Rather than just using social media to talk about how great your product is, connect with people by creating content that isn’t “salesy”.
This type of posting will start conversations and make you memorable.
It’s not about gaming the algorithm of the platform of your choice, it’s about learning to be social on whatever platform your prospect uses.

How to Get Started

Create a buyer-centric profile. It’s not about you, it’s about your customer.
Cultivate a wide and varied network.
Provide insightful content your client can’t find anywhere else.

Resources

Connect with Tim on LinkedIn

Get your copy of Tim Hughes’ book “Social Selling” on Amazon!

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In this episode of The Centricity Podcast, our host Will Riley meets with Joseph Seo for Part 3 of our series on cookies (if you haven’t yet, check out Part 1 and Part 2). Seo is a seasoned marketer who brings his expertise and research-driven approach to marketing strategy to this conversation about the end of third-party tracking and the way companies and agencies alike will have to evolve.

Adjusting to a “Cookieless” Future

The marketing industry won’t collapse, but it will be impacted. One of those impacts has been a boom in programmatic advertising.
Contextual advertising, or advertising on pages relevant to your product, is an effective way to market your product that doesn’t rely on cookies.
Capture more first-party data from your website, marketing team, and customer service team. Reps will need to gather the data rather than rely on it.
Know what kind of data your company uses. If you’re relying on Facebook and Google for your advertising, you may face less extreme changes to your strategy than companies that rely primarily on third-party data.

Effective Marketing Without Cookies

First-party data will produce better results than third-party because consumers who volunteer to participate show a higher level of interest and commitment to your product.
Programmatic advertising works well for mobile advertising. As people increasingly use their phones to explore web content, D2C marketing can be effective.

Current and Forthcoming Impacts

Lower-funnel or late-stage tactics will be impacted first.
Industries will now be forced to invest in gathering first-party data. Combining ad testing and brand lift studies will give companies more useful data than cookies, so we will likely see the development of more sophisticated campaigns.
If your company is fairly established, consider implementing a data solution like Segment to centralize your data and simplify decision-making.

Resources

Don’t forget to check out Parts 1 and 2 of our series on cookies!

Episode 33 The Death of the Cookie: Understanding Internet Privacy PART 1

Episode 34 The Death of the Cookie: Understanding Internet Privacy PART 2

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In today’s episode of the Centricity podcast, our host Sean Doyle meets with NYT-bestselling author Jonah Berger to discuss his book Magic Words. They discuss the science behind the impact of words and how we can increase our impact simply by consciously adjusting how we communicate.

Language of “Identity”

People are more likely to be motivated to do something if they think it reflects who they are or want to become.
Berger offers several examples, including one that asked children to “help clean up,” vs. asking them to “be a helper,” and the latter was more effective persuasively. This works for adults, too!

“Concrete” Language

When most people make a bold claim, they will “hedge”, or add in language of uncertainty.
Berger recommends doing away with hedging and focusing on definite, clear terms if you want to exude confidence.

Resources

Magic Words by Jonah Berger on Amazon

For FREE resources on the SPEACC framework, check out Jonah Berger’s website, http://jonahberger.com

If you’d like to connect with Jonah, you can find him @J1Berger on Twitter, or if you search Jonah Berger on LinkedIn!

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In this episode of the Centricity podcast, Sean Doyle meets with Antonia Wade, Global CMO for PwC and the author of Transforming the B2B Buyer Journey: Increase Leads, Maximize Conversion Rates and Build Loyalty. Wade draws on years of experience as a CMO to bring us the truth of what works, even when that flies in the face of what we have been taught.

Moving Beyond the B2B Funnel

The “funnel” is an outdated model that doesn’t take into account the layers of complexity presently involved in the sales process. Multiple stakeholders, decision-makers, and increasingly technical products make the process less straightforward than in years past.
Funnel imagery encourages sellers to move their buyers through the process as quickly as possible without taking time to create relationships, leading to poor customer experiences and low loyalty.

The Future of Marketing

Don’t sacrifice advertising for brand architecture or vice versa. Both are needed to appeal to stakeholders at all levels of the organization.
Organize your marketing campaign to make data extraction easy. When you offer valuable information to your customers, the information you get back makes these relationships mutually beneficial.

Resources

Pick up Antonia Wade’s book, Transforming the B2B Buyer Journey, on Amazon.

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In today’s episode of the Centricity podcast, our host Sean Doyle meets with Harvey Nix to take a deep dive into the strategic use of AI to creatively add to your sales processes. Nix shares his screen to show you how to write GPT-4 prompts that will get you great output, so check out the video version of the episode! See the Resources section of the show notes for a FREE Prompt Command Worksheet, CMO Cheat Sheet for ChatGPT, and more!

Augmenting the Sales Process

Asking ChatGPT to write you a form sales e-mail or phone script does NOT play to the strengths of the technology.
Nix has helped teams reach success by implementing clear processes, and he believes AI is best suited to automating processes or making them more efficient, leaving the user more freedom to be creative.

ChatGPT WON’T Replace Sellers

While ChatGPT-4 is more accurate than previous versions, it is still only capable of regurgitating information. Knowledgeable people still need to fact-check it and provide strong parameters.
If you want to use it for shortcuts, AI can help you to an extent. But sellers who can reimagine the selling process using AI will still set themselves apart.

Resources

If you’d like to connect with Harvey Nix, reach out to him on LinkedIn!

What Every CEO Should Know About Generative AI (McKinsey Digital)

CMO Cheat Sheet for ChatGPT

CMO Training - Prompt Command Work Sheet

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In today’s episode of the Centricity podcast, our host Sean Doyle sits down with Izach Porter to discuss navigating M&As as a middle-market companies and maximizing outcomes using proven methods.

Preparing to Be Acquired

Porter’s experience supporting businesses through M&As has shown him that having your business financials in order is one of the most important things you can do to prepare.
Buyers are interested in seeing business growth rates, so forecasting and fleshing out growth opportunities will give them the information they want.

Timing Your Partial Exit

Being in a growth stage will give you the highest possible valuation. People often sell when the business is in decline, which puts the seller in a position of weakness.
If you are not in a growth stage but are looking to sell, learn what needs to be fixed. Connect with buyers who have the necessary skills to make that happen.

If you’d like to connect with Izach Porter, you can find him on LinkedIn, or on social media @ecommporter.

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In today’s episode of the Centricity podcast, our host Will Riley meets with Joseph Seo to talk about ChatGPT and discuss how business executives can utilize it in their business.

Understanding ChatGPT

Seo says that if you’re afraid of ChatGPT replacing your job, you don’t understand how to use it. ChatGPT is an incredible tool that can be utilized by both salespeople and marketers.
ChatGPT and similar AIs aren’t anything new. Instead, they’re simply becoming more mainstream.

Utilizing ChatGPT

ChatGPT can’t fully replace sales and marketing. However, they can be used to automate more repetitive tasks. Some examples would be creating a presentation, or doing presentation prep.
To maximize your potential with ChatGPT, you have to give it the correct prompts. You only get out as much as you put in.

If you want to connect with Joseph Seo further, you can find him at the FitzMartin blog.

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In today’s episode of Centricity, our host Sean Doyle meets with Rom LaPointe to discuss LaPointe’s guide to aligning sales and marketing, and why it is important.

Marketing and Sales Alignment

If you want your business to be maximally productive, then you have to align sales and marketing.
The best way to align sales and marketing is to STOP focusing on sales and marketing. Instead, put the buyer first and make them your central focus. Align sales to the customer, then align marketing to the customer and you’ll achieve sales and marketing alignment.
Although sales and marketing alignment is important, there’s also a key distinction between the two: Sales is focused more on the short term while marketing is focused on the long term. To properly align sales and marketing, this discrepancy has to be recognized.
LaPointe recommends a similar approach to Navy SEAL teams. Have small, autonomous groups of people who are proficient at both sales and marketing. At the same time, however, keep overall sales and marketing separate but interconnected.

If you want to learn more about culture in the workplace, or just want to connect with LaPointe, you can check out his newsletter or blog on his website www.capricornleadership.com or his LinkedIn profile.

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In today’s episode of Centricity, our host Sean Doyle meets with Rom LaPointe to discuss LaPointe’s experiences with creating a healthy company culture, and why it’s important.

The Importance of Culture

Over 223 billion dollars are lost every year due to turnover and culture related problems. Although this is a HUGE number, many CEOs are hesitant to actually invest in creating a healthy, enjoyable culture.

To have a good work culture, your employees and team members have to be engaged and excited about working. Employees should enjoy their work and not be focused solely on getting a paycheck.
Marketing and culture have a lot in common. Marketing is the stories you tell customers and clients about your products and services, whereas culture is the stories you tell about your employees and what it’s like to work at your business.
Remote work has become a lot more prevalent ever since the pandemic. 58% of workers believe they can do their work remotely. Remote work DOES have benefits, but there are also certain benefits to working in person. Utilizing a blend of both has given LaPointe the best results.

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Ian Altman is an esteemed business coach and consultant with a proven track record of elevating companies to billion-dollar valuations. In today’s episode of Centricity, our host Sean Doyle sits down with Ian Altman to discuss the fundamentals of Same Side Selling (SSS).

SSS Basics

Same Side Selling is a unique approach that prioritizes solving client issues instead of directly selling to them. Instead of your buyer viewing you as an adversary, the SSS approach positions you as being on the same side.
This approach is effective because buyers are often apprehensive about trusting sellers who only look out for their own interests. However, they are more likely to trust individuals who genuinely help them to solve their problems.

Building Trust

To implement SSS, the first step is to understand your clients and their problems. This can be achieved by asking relevant questions to gather as much information as possible. Armed with this knowledge, you can then position yourself to provide the best solution to their problems.
It is important to note that the focus should not solely be on the sale. Instead, the goal should be to assist your clients in finding a solution that is best suited to their needs.

To learn more about Same Side Selling or to connect with Ian Altman, you can visit his websites at www.samesideselling.com and www.ianaltman.com.

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We all know building trust is vital for success as a salesperson and in business. In today’s episode of Centricity, our host Sean Doyle meets with Phil Gerbyshak to discuss the importance of trust, how sellers often miss it, and how to utilize “why now?” questions.

The Importance of Trust

A problem a lot of B2B sellers do is assuming the person they’re talking to is the ultimate decision maker. Instead, sellers need to establish trust to ACTUALLY learn who the ultimate decision maker is.
Buyers HAVE to trust sellers before they’ll deliver the information to the decision maker. To help establish this trust, you have to communicate with the client frequently and utilize case studies. The majority of buyers have said that they’re more likely to buy IF there’s a review.

Asking “Why Now?”

Another thing B2B sellers have to focus on is why exactly a buyer is currently looking for a solution. Whatever they’re pain point is should take precedence, because solving that pain point is what will help you close the sale.
When you’re talking to executive level buyers, the importance of why now conversations grows. Ask the buyer how much they need your product/service by this year or quarter. This builds trust and will help you close the sale.

If you want to learn more or get in contact with Phil, you can find him at his website www.philgerby.com or on his LinkedIn profile.

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Microcredentials are becoming a lot more prevalent. In today’s episode of Centricity, our host Will Riley meets with Kevin Dunn to talk about microcredentials and how they can strengthen both sellers AND businesses.

The Value of Microcredentials

One of the big appeals of microcredentials is what it proves. People can claim they’ve learned something, yes, but being certified in it PROVES that they’ve genuinely learned that topic.
Having microcredentials on your resume can also bolster it and give you priority for a position compared to unqualified competitors.
However, microcredentials can still be a POWERFUL asset for executives as well as for businesses.

Microcredentials For B2B and Executives

Instead of viewing microcredentials as a simple badge on your LinkedIn profile, view it as a means of developing yourself professionally.
Along with developing yourself professionally, microcredentials help foster BUSINESS growth. When everyone involved with a business’s success is fully certified and aware of what they’re doing, that business will NATURALLY see better results.
Microcredentials also provide sellers with VALUABLE information for buyers and clients. For example, if the client is needing SEO work done, a microcredential can help B2B sellers better meet that buyer’s need.
Microcredentials can also help you build PARTNERSHIPS. If you or your business are certified in working with a certain platform, then you could partner with that platform. Platforms, as well as buyers, are more likely to trust a CERTIFIED seller instead of an uncertified one.

You can get your own microcredentials at www.hubspot.com. If you want to contact Kevin Dunn directly, you can reach out to him on both Twitter and LinkedIn. Dunn also hosts his own podcast, the Agency Unfiltered podcast.

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Appealing to the emotional thinking of sellers, executives especially is PARAMOUNT. In today’s episode of Centricity, our host Sean Doyle meets with Tim Riesterer to discuss how you can better optimize your sales and marketing teams to more efficiently meet the revenue goals you’re trying to meet.

How Executive Level Buyers Buy

Oftentimes, executive-level buyers won’t make a decision on whether or not to buy, or flat-out ghost a seller. Riesterer refers to this as the curse of no decision.
Most of the reasons executives will give a seller for not buying are actually LIES. The real reason is: The seller didn’t appeal to the executive’s emotional thinking.
Buyers ultimately make the decision to purchase something based on both logical AND emotional thinking. You HAVE to appeal to both to actually make the sale.
Essentially, the process is broken into two steps. The first step is based on logic. The executive will give you reasons WHY they want to change or want their problem solved. But the actual decision to go THROUGH with this is purely emotional.

What Executives Look For

When sellers were asked to give themselves a rating on their performance, most times they gave themselves around a B. Buyers, however, gave these sellers an F rating.
Not only do buyers need to be emotionally aroused, but they also need SOMETHING unique from you as a seller.
One of the KEY things that buyers want to know is: What are their competition and others like them doing? Think about it, a seller knows your product incredibly well and has met with several different executives or buyers. Buyers, meanwhile, completely understand their problem but don’t know what others like them are doing. They want to know this, however.
Executives don’t want you to listen to their issues, then repeat their problem back. They already intimately understand their problem. Instead, they want you to point out things that they DIDN’T know, based on what others like them don’t know or are doing.
One of the most POWERFUL tools in your arsenal as a seller is Voyeurism. When meeting with an executive, set benchmarks. Ask the exec how they think they stack up to others, then actually show them how they perform. Tell them how they can improve their performance.

Data Insight Question

Another POTENT tool in your arsenal as a seller is data insight questions or DIQ.
The data in DIQ highlights the scope of the problem to your seller. Essentially, you’re revealing the true extent of their problem and giving them a REASON to buy your product or service.
After providing the data, you then offer insights. Offer some insights on WHY the data looks the way it is, or why things are the way they are.
Finally, you ask the question. Ask them whether or not they’re willing to try your product or service, and transfer ownership of the conversation to the buyer. This gets them INVESTED in the conversation.

The Importance of Contrast

Buyers come to sellers to address issues they have. However, one of the MAIN factors that determine whether or not a buyer will move through with a sale is: How much will they get out OF the sale?
If they get marginally more, or the same, results as they currently are, they WON’T make the sale. You as a seller HAVE to show a noticeable contrast between the buyer’s current state, and their state AFTER buying your product or service.

If you want to learn more, or get in touch with Tim Riersterer, you can go to the website www.corporatevisions.com or www.b2bdecisionlabs.com. Tim also has a book, The Sales Expansion, available on Amazon.

The Expansion Sale: Four Must-Win Conversations to Keep and Grow Your Customers

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In the US, 1 TRILLION dollars is lost every year because sales and marketing teams don’t coordinate together. In today’s episode of Aligned, our host Sean Doyle meets with Tim Parkin to talk about how to optimize your marketing and sales departments.

The Unpopular Truth

Although people don’t enjoy hearing it, as a consultant, the NUMBER ONE thing Parkin tells clients is: Marketing is processing.
Creativity and other factors come into play, but the key aspect of marketing is processing. Having reliable and proven processes to follow is CRITICAl for marketing teams.

A Common Language

Beyond processes, another thing that prevents proper coordination between sales and marketing teams is Communication.
Sales teams and marketing teams speak two COMPLETELY different languages from each other. There are three different suggestions Parkin has for bridging the language barrier: Having table stakes meetings, hosting revenue operations, and again, having solid processes.

Late Stage Marketing

Another issue that prevents marketers from working effectively with sellers is how marketers often step OUT of the process after-sales take over when marketing teams should be involved throughout the ENTIRE sale cycle.
In marketing, there’s a concept called centricity. Centricity refers to the client being the CENTER of the sales process. Sellers and marketers have to focus on centricity.
Marketers can contribute to the sales cycle by reminding buyers of their current issue and how whatever they’re thinking of buying can solve their issue. When buyers prepare to buy, they’ll often look back on their current situation and avoid making the purchase, because change requires effort.

The Monkey Bar Method

Parkin utilizes a technique called the Monkey Bar method whenever he’s working with different clients. He’s seen TREMENDOUS success from it.
Essentially, the method focuses on providing buyers with ALL the information they need. Buyers come into sales with a lot of different questions. In one instance, Parkin worked with a trade school that taught students a few different skills.
Whenever students would go onto the school’s website, they would find different programs. In the pages for the programs, instead of keeping things short, Parkin gave students an extra page discussing career opportunities for different skills.
By focusing on centricity, and offering extra information, Parkin saw a SURGE in lead transformation and success. Focus on centricity, and provide ALL the information leads need.

5 Key Attributes of Great Processes

Parkin has identified 5 KEY attributes that all of the best marketing processes share.
The first attribute is: Being written down.
The second attribute is: Having some sort of visual.
The third attribute is: Being shared and communicated.
The fourth attribute is: Being measurable.
The final attribute is: Being regularly evaluated and adjusted.

If you want to get in contact with Parkin, you can go to his website or call him at 407-499-0303.

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According to LinkedIn, a whopping 1 TRILLION dollars are lost per year because sales teams and marketing teams don’t coordinate together. In today’s episode of the Aligned Podcast, our host Sean Doyle goes over how you CAN coordinate your sales and marketing teams to avoid losses and improve profits.

Generating quality leads:

Getting leads for your business is easy. But making sure they’re QUALITY is the hard part.
One reason why salespeople don’t trust marketers is that marketers are just there to get leads INTERESTED in the product. They answer questions and show off a product or service. That will generate leads, however, those leads aren’t guaranteed to be good, profitable ones.
One scenario mentioned in the episode is a lead already having the product being offered. Imagine if your marketing team generated 100 leads, but 90 of them didn’t have any NEED for your product. Your sales reps have just then wasted time that could’ve been spent finding QUALITY leads.

What sales teams want from marketers:

The MAIN thing that sales reps want from marketers is Communication.
Communication is key in business and in life. If your marketers and sales reps are properly communicating, this prevents any wasted time. Marketers can let the sales team know of potential leads, what they’re looking for, what they have, etc.
Once proper communication is established, the sales team can focus on quality, profitable leads and discard the ones that they can’t sell to.

How to align marketing and sales teams:

Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. Have your sales and marketing teams actually WORK TOGETHER. Focusing solely on your marketing team will prevent sales from working at maximum efficiency. Focusing solely on your sales team will prevent marketing from working at maximum efficiency. Make sure the needs of both marketing and sales align.
Alongside having your marketing and sales teams work together, prioritize COMMUNICATION. As said, communication is key. Too often, marketers are unaware of what leads should be prioritized, leading to wasted time.
Flip the conversation. Focus on what the BUYER ACTUALLY WANTS and how to meet their needs. Have sales reps and marketers work together to figure out a.) What a buyer wants and b.) How to best deliver your product or service to them.

Making sure that your marketing and sales teams are aligned is CRUCIAL for increasing profitability. One can’t function maximally without the other. Utilize these tips, and watch your profit grow.

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment program will analyze your current sales and marketing structure to deliver a plan based on the needs of your prospects, bringing you increased revenue, expansion opportunities, and (above all) a unified front when communicating with prospects.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Company culture and retention are directly connected. After all, if you fail to build good company culture, you fail to retain top talent. At FitzMartin, we help leaders like you raise their NPS scores from the low 60s to the high 80s (and, more importantly, present a plan to help you do the same.)

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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In this episode of Aligned Sean and guest Donald Kelly, The Sales Evangelist continue their discussion on how important getting the private commitment is before you can get the public commitment to move your deal forward. Obtaining both private and public commitment will take you on the path to close your deals.

Being strategic in obtaining buy-in:

Need to ask – “what do you want?”
Develop a structure to communicate effectively.
Marketing needs to provide the pyramid of the industry and how selling works within that pyramid.
Exercise patience.

What is a concise business plan:

Should be short and simple.
Ask the validation question. Both to you personally and to the enterprise.
Case Studies can assist in creating commitment from your prospect.
Illustrate what the action plan is and prescribed path.

Takeaways:

It’s all about your prospect and what they want and/or need.
Good reviews are helpful in receiving commitment from your prospect.
Create a group of raving fans that share the same problems as your prospects.
Build a page on your website that defines the journey that past customers have taken to get your prospect’s desired result.
When prospects make a public commitment – they make the commitment stick.
Keep the long game in mind.
Be able to define what problem you solve, what happens if you don’t solve the problem, and what’s the likely outcome.

If you want to close more deals, you need to understand that commitment is powerful and has two steps. There is no set time that it takes to go through the process. But there is sequential order. If your prospect is not privately committed then they will never commit publicly.

Connect with Donald on LinkedIn or email him at donald@thesalesevangelist.com.

Submit an inquiry at fitzmartin.com/contact and they’ll be happy to answer any questions.

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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On today’s episode of Aligned, Sean and guest Donald Kelly, The Sales Evangelist discuss the importance of both private and public commitment in the marketing and sales process. When sales and marketing teams work together, your company will see a 36% higher customer retention rate and a 38% higher win rate.

Businesses lose deals because they don’t act:

40-60% out of 2.5 million recorded sales calls – both transactional and complex deals failed because they intended to act but didn’t.
Assessing pros and cons of moving forward with the deal.
Science states that somebody will not take action until rough six months out.
Prospects are looking forward.

The “why” of private and public commitment:

Always center your efforts on the buyer’s needs in the beginning to raise consciousness.
Consciousness awareness is an effective tool early in the process.
The needs of the buyers are different as they go through the sales process.
Buyers need to make a personal commitment before they make a public commitment.
Preparation is a cornerstone from which effective action is built.

Takeaways for centricity:

A good salesperson knows when to slow down.
Need to acknowledge that people are the ones making the decisions.
Always have tools that allow you to look forward.
Your job is to help the prospect evaluate how your offering will serve them.
Create a concise business case to confirm what the buyer’s intent is.

Resources: Changing For Good; Same Side Selling.

Connect with Donald on LinkedIn or email him at donald@thesalesevangelist.com.

Submit inquiry at fitzmartin.com/contact and they’ll be happy to answer any questions.

Changing for Good: A Revolutionary Six-Stage Program for Overcoming Bad Habits and Moving Your Life Positively Forward

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In today’s episode of Aligned, our host Sean talks with the Sales Evangelist, Donald Kelly, to discuss late-stage sales, self-help, and five application models that you can apply to late-stage selling.

Self-help

In any B2B process, you are able to include B2C in the process.
According to Mckinsey 99% of B2B buyers said they are willing to spend $50,000 on self-help. You’ve got to start implementing self-help in the B2B world.
Make promises around things like service. Remember it’s not about the price.
Do a testimonial that is focused on only delivering information that is safe and matters to late-stage prospects.
Give a taste of early access and let your prospects know what it would be like to be your customer.
Utilize consultative selling tools.

Tune in to our past episode with Donald discussing guided help on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and connect with Donald on LinkedIn or at thesalesevaneglist.com for more information and content. To learn more about the transtheoretical theory of behavioral change check out this link.

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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In today’s episode of Aligned, our host Sean talks with the Sales Evangelist, Donald Kelly, to discuss late stage sales and explore the best practice of building frictionless buyer journeys and understanding the buyers point of view.

Helping relationships

The goal is to continue to inspire the prospect to make change. Give them the ability to make a commitment.
Consultative selling is taking off the salesperson hat and becoming a consultant to your prospect - become good at problem-finding and solving problems. A transactional salesperson pushes on closing and focuses on features, benefits and price.

Guided help

People need a guide, but if you don’t trust your guide it won’t work.
Good sales and marketing is about helping other people achieve their goals. If you see sales and marketing as manipulation then this idea won’t work for you.
Donald has found massive success in sharing free information and being a guided help to those around him.
Don’t be afraid to give people value through providing free information.
There is a whole world of guided help that is another marketing channel.

Tune in to our past episode with Donald discussing reward behaviors on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and connect with Donald on LinkedIn or at thesalesevaneglist.com for more information and content. To learn more about the transtheoretical theory of behavioral change check out this link.

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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In today’s episode of Aligned, our host Sean continues his conversation with the Sales Evangelist, Donald Kelly, to discuss the centricity model and how limiting bad customer behaviors can help generate more sales for your organization.

The second-best practice in the countering world is the practice of looking back

Buyers will continually look back at their own bad behaviors. When a buyer’s response to a seller's inquiry is to ask for more information, they’re not seriously considering the solution.
Flip the looking back ideology to looking forward - equip your sales and marketing teams with a playbook that focuses on the future state.
Don’t spend time explaining specs on pricing, features, or benefits. Instead, sell the buyer on the future state they’ll experience with your proposed solution.
One of the most common mistakes for salespeople during the close is forgetting to remind the buyer of their initial state. Reminding people where they’re coming from is powerful.
Fear of change often comes down to the process.

Irrational self-statements

Irrational self-statements are rigid reasons why the customer can’t move forward.
Create a playbook outlining all the common irrational self-statements that your customers have and how you can counter them.
Counter their bad behavior with integrity, courage, and kindness. A dose of rationality makes a strong statement.

Customer success

Your customers are constantly looking and information is everywhere.
Even though you know you can name a hundred ways that you are better than the competitor, your customer can’t.
How are you marketing to your customers who are rethinking? Not just new customers but customers who are 2 or 3 years in.
Create a report card of the success that you are bringing your customers. Don’t wait till the end of the contract to communicate with them.
Offer a channel of your marketing budget to market to your own customers.

There is more money to be made by fixing the end of the sales cycle than there is by creating more awareness, improving your brand, and getting more leads. Sell backwards, start at the end.

Tune in to our past episode with Donald discussing reward behaviors on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and connect with Donald on LinkedIn or at thesalesevaneglist.com for more information and content.

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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Sales and marketing alignment is critical for middle-market companies to either expand into enterprise territory or increase revenue for long-lasting company success. In today’s episode of Aligned, our host Sean is joined by the Sales Evangelist, Donald Kelly, to discuss the centricity model and how limiting bad customer behaviors can help generate more sales for your organization.

RFPs: a bad (but well-intentioned) customer behavior:

The centricity model, discussed in prior podcast episodes, helps frame a seller’s mindset to better understand buyer behavior (especially bad buyer behavior.)
RFPs, or requests for proposals, are standard for many B2B organizations, espeically those connected with governments.
While well-intentioned, these can quickly become a systemic problem where the buying organization opts for the cheapest option rather than the one that provides the most value.

Don’t invent on the fly; build a plan and a model to produce more revenue.

Building relationships with the individuals in purchasing companies helps you understand the reasoning behind the RFP instead of piggybacking off of an existing deal.
Remember why a company might want to create an RFP: to create the best deal. As a seller and provider of a service, asking practical questions is the key to understanding the actual value an organization needs.
If an organization is focused on utilizing the RFP, create options that aren’t dependent on a large-scale implementation, like a department or select area of use.

RFPs are done with good intent, but why don’t they get the best results?

Would you hire your lawyer or accountant based on the lowest bid?
In the process of generating bids, the best client is typically never the one willing to undercut every other competitor to win the bid.

Overcoming the RFP through countering:

Countering is a technical term for substituting an improper path the buyer is currently on with a better one. (If someone is trying to quit smoking, a counter would be to enjoy a lollipop.)
The behavior a buyer is in is the very reason they’re seeking a solution. So even if we understand a habit is wrong, it’s still a habit and takes effort to correct it.
Countering isn’t about ending the bad habit but instead replacing the bad habit with a more constructive one.

Centricity informs you where the buyer is.

One of the most common mistakes is a lack of trust. Because sales and marketing are focused on the end objective, we offer end solutions too quickly.
As soon as someone doesn’t listen or demonstrate listening before offering a solution, the solution likely won’t be accepted.
In the middle-stage sales cycle, sellers should restate the problem. Especially if the buyer seems hesitant about further pursuing a solution, reminding them about the problem (and mentioning issues they stated experiencing three weeks prior) is a great way to put them back on track.

Tune in to our past episode with Donald discussing reward behaviors on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and connect with Donald on LinkedIn or at thesalesevaneglist.com for more information and content.

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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When it comes to building relationships between a buyer and seller, gift-giving is a powerful and useful tactic that benefits both parties. But how can we successfully implement gift-giving without excess spending on prospects that don’t end up buying? In today’s episode of Aligned, Sean wraps up his three-part series with Donald Kelly by discussing proper gift-giving and how any seller can build and maintain relationships with their prospects.

Gifts should not be for everyone:

Gifts should be mostly reserved for people later into the sales cycle, or at least in the middle.
If a seller were to buy gifts for every early-stage prospect, they’ll face exorbitant costs while also giving gifts to people who will not place as high a value on it as a buyer with an existing relationship with the seller.
Sales should not have control too soon when it comes to gift-giving; the buyer should be at a designated spot within the buying process to warrant gift-giving as an environmental control.
Sellers should not have private control over their sales data - if they spend company money to build relationships with clients, that information should be available to the organization that paid for it.

Bonus environment control: Use NDAs to help control late-stage deals:

In general, it’s best to work with an attorney to utilize NDAs properly.
NDAs can be signed by both the selling and buying organizations to build comfort and reduce anxiety, especially in industries full of proprietary information (i.e. technology and software.)
It is an olive branch that psychology develops commitment and introduces the notion of finality within the deal that encourages the buyer to close.

Aligned Episode Resources:

Check out the prior two episodes in this three-part series discussing environmental controls, available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
For more information and content from Donald, visit thesalesevangelist.com or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Visit fitzmartin.com for resources, articles, and other information that helps any business leader foster connections between their sales and marketing departments.

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Even when a buyer is satisfied with their current provider of a service, 80% will still consider buying elsewhere. How can sellers build value and demonstrate the effectiveness of an organization to late-stage clients? In today’s episode of Aligned, Sean continues his three-part series with Donald Kelly discussing how to manage and build effective environmental controls to close more deals.

Utilizing cues and interruptions:

Cues are essential environmental controls because you can limit bad buyer behaviors with them.
Creating automated cues to encourage a particular action from the buyer builds brand loyalty and a level of trust that would otherwise occur with another company.

Buyer’s retreat is a natural (and expected) element of sales:

Anything within sales and marketing can be done with integrity and morals, or it can be done with harmful intent. Sellers must make themselves valuable, but not at the expense of the company’s control.
Limit early-stage spending because the relationship driving the sale has not yet been built. Instead, create an understanding and connection, then supplement that relationship with middle and end-stage buyers.

Strategies to prevent buyer’s retreat:

Tie results to your efforts. This makes buyers infinitely less likely to leave because they know their success is tied to your involvement.
Demonstrate your values through gifts, events, and communication to deepen the relationship between the individuals within the organization.

Tune in to our past episode with Donald discussing reward behaviors on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and connect with Donald on LinkedIn or at thesalesevaneglist.com for more information and content.

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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In the end, the goal of every sales and marketing department is to help their organization close more deals. But did you know six key elements can help manage how a professional relationship operates? In today’s episode of Aligned, Sean is joined by sales expert and founder of The Sales Evangelist Donald Kelly in the first of a three-part series to learn how to apply a framework to build and maintain scalable sales pipelines.

Environmental controls dictate the boundaries of the relationship.

Environmental controls have to impact other people beyond the individual buyer. However, you must be buyer-centric and focused primarily on their goals and expectations.
Environment management is the key to establishing and maintaining good behavior while limiting and preventing bad behavior.
Sellers can’t intentionally change many attributes of the conditions surrounding the selling process, but there are some we can exert and influence other elements.

Preventing buyer’s fatigue:

Throughout the buying process, many buyers grow tired of pushback from teammates, management, and sellers, especially when the status quo is so easy to maintain.
If you want to take people through the journey of change, understand how quickly a person is willing to move and scale the journey with the individual.
Learn the internal politics within the organization. For example, one person might not want to risk jeopardizing their growth at the company by making the wrong purchase decision.
Supply your contact with knowledge as ammunition to reinforce the connection and combat potential objections in-house.

Managing different perspectives at different touchpoints within the buying journey:

Pain mapping is a powerful tactic because the human desire to avoid pain is incredibly high, whether financial, strategic, or personal.
The wrong thing would be to take everyone to golf or dinner and expect everyone to be at the same point in the journey - because they aren’t.
People don’t buy products; they buy the improvement of the business.
Marketers and sellers must convince the buyer not about the product's viability, but how purchasing the product will correlate with meeting their business objectives.
Constrain the pain - Use social liberation with positive insertions of company collateral in pitches and develop the processes in later-stage opportunities to make the buyer process not only seamless, but designed explicitly for the organization to implement.
Environmental changes either add positive or remove negative elements to the deal that convinces the buyer to move forward.

Aligned Episode Resources:

Read the transtheoretical theorem of behaviors in “Changing for Good” by James Prochaska, John Norcross, and Dr. DiClemente.
Check out the Pentateuch, otherwise known as the first five books of the old testament.
Tune in to our past episode with Donald discussing reward behaviors on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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On today’s episode of Aligned, Sean is joined by digital marketing devotee Ed Rusch. Ed is passionate about customer experiences and is the current CMO of Blue Ridge. In a three-part series, Ed will articulate his major takeaways from his years of experience in the marketing space. Today’s topic? Common myths and misconceptions of executive-level marketing.

Ed’s marketing origins:

Born and raised in Cleveland, his first gigs post-college were hosting various radio (playing adult contemporary and Today’s Top 40 hits.)
As he’s grown and learned more about the industry, Ed is now intrigued by the concept of modern marketing and what that means for professionals today.
Primarily a B2B marketer, Ed emphasizes maintaining a learning mindset to understand the challenges and struggles of modern marketing.

There is still a disconnect in how marketing is viewed.

A common misconception of marketing is its emphasis on “arts and crafts.” Sure, design plays an integral role in marketing. But that’s far from the only thing (or the most important thing) that marketers do.
An exciting thing about marketing today is the ability to touch and impact many aspects of the business beyond what traditional marketing could do.
But because the possibilities are extensive, it can be difficult for marketers to know where to leverage their influence.

A clear marketing goal: make an impact on your company’s revenue growth.

Marketing can articulate a value message to the financial community, which is a needle-mover for those equity transitions.
There's a need for both short-term success and long-term value creation, which marketing can create and influence.
Marketing can be far more than a sales supplement when given the proper support.

Ed’s past work exemplifies the importance of strategic marketing.

Initially viewed as a technology company, Ed’s company had a commanding market share of their industry (an amalgamation of technology and construction.)
They couldn’t grow until they found a new avenue to expand into. And that avenue was connecting suppliers to buyers.
Establishing this new avenue involved creating not just a strategy but the story and messaging around their platform.
It also involved creating a community between buyers, sellers, and logistics providers (and agree, as an organization, that they were a supply chain platform.) This means both internal and external factors were at play.

Marketing adds value in ways beyond its traditional implications.

For example, marketing attracts new talent to your purpose and mission. Why do people want to be a part of your organization? Marketing can explain that.
From a marketing perspective, the ability to reimagine your story and then leverage that in both employee engagement and the acquisition of new talent pays dividends.

Episode Resources:

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies and executives pursuing growth or looking for new levers to pull.
Read more about cognitive marketing on FitzMartin’s website.
Order Sean’s book Shift.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.

To get in contact with Ed, connect with him on LinkedIn.

Shift: 19 Practical, Business-Driven Ideas for an Executive in Charge of Marketing but Not Trained for the Task

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Both sellers and marketers can and should use reward-driven behavior to establish rapport and build relationships with potential buyers. In today’s episode of Aligned, Sean is joined by the founder and Chief Evangelist of The Sales Evangelist, Donald Kelly, to discuss his take on reward-driven behavior and how marketing and sales departments can implement it into existing methodologies.

Failure of the trade show fishbowl:

Using rewards to gain something upfront (like an email) is not an effective reward tactic. You don’t want people to engage with you purely because of free stuff.
You’re giving stuff away without understanding why you’re giving stuff away. The same idea holds true for the dinners, the golf games, and the drinks.
Don’t eliminate rewards. Instead, understand them. The most common mistake in sales and marketing is spending too much money too early in the sales cycle.
Close the deals in the existing pipeline before allocating money to people who aren’t in the funnel at all.

Understanding positive and negative rewards:

Rewards can take two forms - positive and negative. A punishment could be removing a certain meeting or adding a certain call to an itinerary.
Salespeople are bumblebees - misunderstood creatures. They’re crucial to the environment, but other people are scared of them. A punishment could be not having the time to meet with a prospect
Positioning gives you power. When a company positions itself in a way where they aren’t dependent on specific clients to reach revenue goals, it can afford to make clients walk in line.

Rewards can be positive.

Rewards from the self - A prospect who, upon achieving a certain milestone, should be coached and guided to get a reward.
Rewards from the others - Where sales and marketing can have a more direct input
Business plan - late-stage only. If you give stuff away too early, it won’t convert the prospects and business leads you to want.

Managing

Give a verbal or written kudos
Encourage someone to consider changing and being self-aware of the weaknesses and the self-reflection that results in accepting change
One of Donald’s past clients was moving to Google Suite, and he worked for a document management company. Remind them that going to Google Suite, while challenging while it’s happening, is the best case for a long-term growth strategy.
It’s okay to give a reward for self-evaluation. And, if you’re confident with the position, you have the safety to make additional suggestions and comments to help guide those prospects.

Contracting

Right before a deal is closed, and there is no exchange of relationship, there are informal contracts that can move the decision-making team before a formal agreement takes place.
It can be meeting at a restaurant, bringing a cup of coffee, scale the reward up and down depending on the situation
If you see someone’s house, they have to give you a level of trust. A common practice is an NDA, but use it to get an idea of what the NDA includes.
When you give the NDA to a buyer, it’s akin to a promise ring. You aren’t married yet, but there’s a level of commitment.
The act of signing is almost the same level that would come if it were an actual agreement. The act of signing a piece of paper connotes the finality that an agreement is in place.

Shaping

There are lots of micro-wins that we can accomplish, and shaping is making small, incremental changes rather than a large sudden change.
Instead of requiring one large bulk purchase, just buy a smaller quantity and work your way up to a larger amount.
Shaping will reflect integrity and lower the potential risks that might take place.
What’s In It For Me? (WIIFM) addresses the emotional and political capital a person might lose or gain from making a particular decision.

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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A net promoter score is one of the best market research metrics available. With it, you can determine if a user is a potential promoter of the product, service, or company. In today’s episode of Aligned, Sean interviews research professional and founder of Thoughtful Research Erin Sowell and Fitzmartin’s Anna Svarney to discuss the utility of a net promoter score and why middle-market leaders should research before making decisions.

Research shows areas you could improve.

To transform for success, you can’t expect perfection. You must bring people to guide you as you make customer-facing company decisions.
An NPS question often asks, “have you ever recommended or not recommended a line of research?” but human interactions are not always so cut and dry.
An NPS gives more actionable data regarding who is a promoter and who’s a detractor.

Limitations of an NPS score:

NPS, from a performance standpoint, creates bias.
For employee NPS (ENPS), scores determining leadership interactions inherently contain interpersonal bias.
The same holds true for service and customer relationships - the customer knows the score will influence the employee.
Those happy with your brand should be training for advocacy, whether through a testimonial or follow-up, to understand how they experience your brand.
Different testimonials influence people differently depending on where they are in the sales cycle.

Passive consumers and promoter advocates:

Passives are people who have a good experience but are not good enough to warrant promoter levels of advocacy.
These consumers don’t need to speak positively about their experience, and they’re influenced by competitors.
With passives, you want to ask them different questions, learning what experience or change will drive them past passivity.
Because they’re looking at different competitors, they’ll have a specific but essential market perception. What do they think about competitors, and how do they compare?

Transactional versus relational loyalty from consumers:

Transactional loyalty is using a product or service as long as it meets your needs.
Relational loyalty is using a product or service because you like the company and are excited to work with them.
Some businesses will function with either model - one is not inherently better than the other.
An NPS can indicate which model your company uses but look for a directional trend instead of an absolute number in your NPS score.

Research is about meeting customer needs to connect with audiences. Inspire your CEO to take steps to learn through research. Don’t let an NPS be your only insight into customers this year - there should always be some level of customer research within your company.

For more insights from Erin, contact her at erin.sowell@thoughtfulresearch.com or via her website, thoughtfulresearch.com. You can reach Anna Svarny at anna@fitzmartin.com.

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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Today’s episode of the Aligned Podcast continues Sean’s discussion with guest Ed Rusch, Chief Revenue Officer at Deck Commerce, to understand the best way to construct a high-functioning SDR department.

Handling the SDR workload:

SDR teams help buyers make private commitments before a public close.
If you have one SDR who handles leads they come and just does outbound when they can, what gets dropped first when the workload is too great? The outbound calling.
Assuming inbound teams close only 50% of leads, that’s an inherent problem. You must have dedicated outbound callers who can ensure the job gets done.

Use specific KPIs to understand the language, verticals, and nuances of the selling process.

Know the one or two KPIs most important to your audience and accompanying sub-verticals.
Is a conversation a valuable metric? Yes, if it achieves two pieces of qualifying (or disqualifying) information.
There’s a cost to everything - from emailing, writing content, and maintenance. Getting disqualifying people off the list is the best way to save money.

Outsourcing an SDR team:

Outsourcing can be a powerful solution, depending on your circumstances.
Part of Blue Ridge’s success is (in part) due to third-party work. However, what you do with an inbound SDR team is not the same as a third-party team.
Outsourced teams can support your company with the right direction and support, but you must mitigate third-party risk by being selective in where you deploy those teams.
Using third-party teams to investigate adjacent verticals outside your primary audience is a smart way to gain insight into the viability of the vertical and in situations where having a conversation is better than no conversation at all.

Starting your SDR team from scratch:

First, understand that few decisions are permanent. There are ideal and mediocre situations, and most of the ones you make will be somewhere in the middle.
Set expectations and metrics based on where you’re at today, in 90 days, and six months.
After that period, adjust your KPIs and expectations as the team matures.
Don’t look for a level of perfection from a new sales team. If you fail to allow growth and outsource, it will likely fail.
Work with expectations to understand the journey and what you’ll do later to meet expectations.
When building an SDR team, start with an internal outbound team that targets low-hanging fruit to secure funding and talent for scalable growth.

For more great content from Ed, connect with him on LinkedIn.

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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Today’s episode of the Aligned podcast continues into part two of our three-part series featuring Ed Rusch. Ed has served as Chief Marketing Officer for several different companies, and his efforts yielded significant parts of their success. In this series, he and Sean discuss the importance of finding a happy medium between sales and marketing alignment.

Generating leads to fuel company growth:

Growing a pipeline can be accomplished through multiple strategies. In general, aiming for a consistent and reliable method might be a better long-term strategy than others.
If you have an ambitious 30-50% growth rate, driving growth relies on the sales development reps establishing an effective strategy to move mid-market prospects through the funnel.

Developing the SDR team:

Senior sellers don’t necessarily want to spend their time managing early-stage buyers - no should they. An early-stage seller uses the opportunity as a starting experience.
SDRs shouldn’t complete sales development work throughout the funnel in a broad capacity.
Instead, an SDR team should be segmented into different areas of specialization and accountability.
Inbound SDRs encounter prospects who know what can properly affect their problem and need guided content based on how they enter the conversion.
As an outbound, we’re reaching out to the people, generating interest based on competitive analyses and market research.
A recent study found that, for the first time, prospects wanted a seller to enter the conversation earlier in the process than in previous years.

Be disruptive and spark imagination (professionally.)

Ensure your SDR team understands the buyer from their own perspective. You must have the external voice of the customer to be influential.
It’s essential to see and contemplate the buyer's needs and take action based on those established needs.
There is no shortage of content. So, positioning your brand to put important, need-based content in front of a prospect will make the most headway.
Don’t speak broadly about “SaaS” content as a SaaS company. Instead, make meaningful specific content that addresses prospects’ needs.

Tune in to our next episode for the conclusion of Sean’s discussion with Ed. For more great content from Ed, connect with him on LinkedIn.

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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Today’s episode of the Aligned podcast launches a three-part series featuring Ed Rusch. Ed has served as Chief Marketing Officer for several different companies, and his efforts yielded significant parts of their success. In this series, he and Sean discuss the importance of finding a happy medium between sales and marketing alignment.

Run your business like you want to sell it.

Many elements of sales and marketing would work if they were correctly integrated. Unfortunately, and most frequently, the gap between the two is where there isn’t enough support.
In many ways, the closing game has not changed in its goals. However, the applications of closing are what have changed so rapidly. If you can combine these two facets, you’ll find new opportunities.
SDRs, or Sales Development Representatives, play a vital role in that process.

What would an SDR do?

Also known as BDRs (Business Development Representatives), these roles provide many supplemental resources to pursue alignment.
Marketing-based leads frequently produce prospects considered “low quality.” However, they aren’t low-quality; they’re just in the early stages of the sales funnel.
Sales professionals like end-funnel leads because they’re closer to purchasing. SDRs can take those early-stage leads and nurture them later in the process so a sales professional can close more quickly.
This also speaks to the increased ability to act on leads promptly. A company that responds to a form fill within 60 minutes will win almost every time.

Frustrations arise when high-quality leads fizzle out.

This issue arises when there’s a difference between what they want to hear and what your business communicates.
SDRs keep this from happening by maintaining consumer expectations and aligning those expectations with what sales will bring to the table.

Five qualifications Ed uses to define a sales-qualified lead:

SDRs should book prospect meetings within 30 days.
Have stated sub-verticals you know your business can support and win.
Include revenue bands in your ideal consumer profile that automatically qualify if they pass that threshold.
Determine if you can serve where they’re located.
The situation must be in an area your solution can help solve.

Ed’s qualifications aren’t a silver solution for every business - decide that qualities automatically qualify a lead for your organization. Tune in to the next episode of Aligned to learn more from Ed and Sean as they detail how an SDR can contribute to the lead qualification process.

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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In today’s episode of Aligned, we continue our conversation featuring Fitzmartin’s Jessica Jardin and Hubspot’s Jordan Benjamin. In this second-part conversation, Jordan discusses the importance of understanding how data-driven decisions and an integrated toolset impact your sales cycle.

The evolution of Hubspot:

Hubspot has made several strategic changes over its history, culminating with over 120,000 users worldwide.
Hubspot’s original goal was simply to help people get more leads. They wanted to change the conversation from “Hey, buy my stuff,” to answering questions and aligning with the buyer.
Companies use different tools to meet their needs. However, multiple tools and systems made it inefficient to use and operate, especially when extrapolated insights and data are needed in tandem.
Initial CRMs were a glorified Rolodex, and Hubspot set out to change that perception. They expanded their services to include other essential teams to make it a systematic and efficient experience that helps everyone do their jobs.

Shifting the executive perception:

When aligning teams, Jordan thinks about measurement and analytics. When using several systems, it’s challenging to get quality data to understand the customer journey.
Can you get the information you need? Yes. Is it more expensive, challenging, and time-consuming? Also yes.
Hubspot brought an inter-departmental alignment responsible for driving revenue and limiting excess costs.
Hubspot was sold primarily as an inbound marketing tool, and some executives are surprised when they learn that the versatility goes far beyond that limited capacity.

Practical applications of Hubspot:

You can receive notifications when a lead opens or engages with your email.
Coming from a marketing perspective means you can leverage marketing automation to reach out in a way that resonates with the buyer.
Companies purchase other solutions for calendar scheduling, but that’s already available in Hubspot, meaning marketing can send out emails that include a salesperson’s schedule.
Focus on what you do best because Hubspot has a thousand developers on standby to refine and evolve the product to fit your needs.

For more content from Jordan, follow him on LinkedIn or tune in to his podcast, Peak Performance Selling.

This episode is sponsored in part by FitzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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Today’s episode of Aligned is a section from Fitzmartin’s webinar featuring Hubspot’s Jordan Benjamin and Fitzmartin’s Jessica Jardin to discuss what Presidents, CEOs, and any middle-market leaders need to know when analyzing technology solutions.

Every decision-maker has their own views and motivations.

Regardless of cost or usability, user experience is fundamental to successful technology integration. If people don’t use it, what’s the point?
Moving towards cloud-based software means IT and technical roles need input into the decision-making process.
Make something incredibly easy to adopt because if people don’t use it, you aren’t moving your business forward.

Establish a bottom line of trust between departments:

In many cases, IT and marketing teams might find it challenging to establish a software solution that satisfies all teams.
A data-driven approach helps establish a solution that drives results. A highly customizable and nuanced solution might sound appealing, but the increased integration costs might make the solution less beneficial than expected.

The truth behind CRMs:

By definition, a CRM is a customer relationship management tool. However, it is synonymous with a sales platform. Shouldn’t relationship management encompass more?
Growth is a team sport; it’s not just the job of sales, marketing, or any one department.
Track touchpoints throughout the relationship to have shared context throughout the customer’s buying journey.

Remove complexity to scale growth:

Simplifying the buying process and the communication model between internal teams makes scaling dramatically simpler.
Identifying opportunities to work in alignment fosters a development process that benefits both consumers and your business.
A time-to-value system is critical. Value progress over perfection, because taking time to make significant steps means your new system might lose value once integrated.

Join us for part two for a more in-depth application of new tech integration. For more content from Jordan, follow him on LinkedIn or tune in to his podcast, Peak Performance Selling.

This episode is sponsored in part by FItzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

This episode is sponsored in part by Fitzmartin’s Organization and Culture Alignment:

Create your company culture based on a shared mission to attract and retain top talent. Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to learn more.

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Outsourcing and hiring new talent is a natural outgrowth of scaling a business. But how can a small or mid-sized company do this process effectively while retaining a full-funnel? In today’s episode of Aligned, Sean is joined by the founder of Sales Schema, Dan Englander, to hear his thoughts on the issue.

There is a proper time to hire:

With the caveat that his domain space is marketing and advertising, the first order of operations is getting client work off your plate.
From there, establish a process for teeing up prospecting opportunities.
When accommodating people on your team with defined roles, once a process is in place for getting prospects, invest money in a closer.
The skillset required to get a skeptical person to talk to you is numerous: creativity, strategy, systems and operations thinking (and a good amount of hustle and follow-up.)
Dan’s philosophy is that it takes more than one person to make the process work.

Identifying your value:

To lower risks in hiring, figure out where your value lies.
Oftentimes an agency has never had to figure that out because they rely solely on the strength of referral. So how do you identify value? Through positioning and experience.
Companies frequently outsource something for the partnership to end up failing. Why? Because that company is doing the same repeated action done by different companies.
While that still works if you’re selling something new, it won’t work forever.

Use the trust and relationships you’ve built to grow.

Realize when you hire a salesperson, you are now a part-time sales trainer. You can’t just give collateral and expect them to succeed.
Dunbar’s Number is the psychological research that discusses someone’s circle of influence informs our outreach.
There’s a difference between asking for an introduction and manipulating people into giving referrals.

Mapping connections and doing it at scale is what leads to success.

Clients typically do this anyway, but it’s just done somewhat haphazardly.
What if you can figure out the people you already know in specific accounts?
All sales and marketing is about change. Social liberation elevates and allows someone unaware of a need for change to consider it.
Breakthrough Advertising from the 60s is a hard-to-find book, but it addresses the stages of marketing sophistication.

For more great content from Dan, visit salesschema.com, check out his podcast (The Digital Agency Growth Podcast), or email him at dale@salesscema.com.

FItzMartin’s Sales and Marketing Alignment:

Why does proper sales and marketing alignment result in a 32% average lift in revenue? Because a unified company centered around its prospects can’t help but thrive.

To set your company up for success, visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to discover how to unify your sales and marketing for the best results.

FitzMartin’s Innovation and Insights

The FitzMartin approach to research is simple: start with data. We use statistical analysis and data visualization to clarify the haze around customer sentiment, behavior, and lifetime value metrics. Our most recent study helped a financial institution understand a group of new customers, identify their ideal customers and craft a plan to acquire more ideal customers.

Visit fitzmartin.com/solutions to download a free Sales Barrier Analysis Worksheet to find the gaps and barriers in your organization and read for yourself about the values a partnership with FitzMartin can deliver to you.

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Today’s episode of Aligned continues Sean and guest Will Riley’s discussion on internet privacy changes and what it means for your marketing efforts in 2023. As a RevOps expert, Will shares his (inadvertent) first hand experience with terms of use issues and how you, as a marketer or business owner, can protect your company.

Will’s tragic tale:

A client used Google ads as a primary digital advertising platform, and the client had a privacy policy available. However, they did not have a cookie policy. Because of this, that client received an email stating they were losing all Google advertising rights.
It wasn’t a policy issue; in Will's case, their website policy was acceptable and allowed for paid advertising. However, when you advertise to a specific audience segment, that must be indicated in a privacy clause. And the client’s policy didn’t reflect that nuance.
The takeaway? As platforms like Google and Facebook get pressure from the government to maintain privacy standards, they make updates the users don’t necessarily see.
Before you place an ad, ensure you comply with the most current policy to ensure your ad will be approved.

2023 will bring a drastic change to privacy:

It’s not doomsday, just a different day, and putting the correct parameters in place now will help with the initial adjustment.
It’s not as easy as buying ads. There are now risks and legal implications if you ignore violations.
A lot of third-party leverages domains other than your website. So, in some ways, the form of retargeting now will cease to exist.
Lookalike targeting will likely stay - finding users similar (based on demographic and psychographic information.)
You can buy people who have visited a database of every phone that’s entered specific geography. If you’ve been in a particular NFL stadium, you’ll get ads for stuff.
People don’t know what companies are doing with their data. And that’s going to change radically.

Takeaways for digital advertising:

If you can’t use a company like AdRoll to advocate and check the legality of your ads (and choose to go direct-to-market), invest in an expert rep who can guide you through the legality and policies.
Invest in a CRM or marketing automation that enables compliance (HubSpot has integrated within its system the ability to enable compliance with GDPR.)
Create a simplified tech stack. If you need new platforms or tools, make sure they natively integrate.

What you need to do next:

Does your marketing team buy any data? If so, what are you doing with it, and where are you purchasing it from?
Using mass lists will no longer be safe, especially if you do not get each user’s permission to contact.
Before advertising on digital platforms like Facebook and Google, have a privacy policy and cookie policy.
Ensure you have publicly accessible legal documentation that references visitor data tools, intent, and storage.

If you need a standard privacy policy or cookie policy to get the ball rolling, contact Will@fitzmartin.com

Start vetting out existing tech and ask if they’re in compliance with the data privacy laws.

Email Will at will.riley@fitzmartin.com

Submit inquiry at fitzmartin.com/contact and they’ll be happy to answer any questions.

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As the third-party digital cookie begins to crumble, what does that mean for marketing professionals? In today’s episode of Aligned, Sean and FitMartin’s Revenue Operations Director WIll Riley discuss the implications of upcoming internet privacy changes and outline tactics to maintain effective digital marketing in 2023.

Cookies and Privacy - What’s the difference?

Privacy involves a company’s intent with your data and what it does with that data.
In contrast, cookies have been an addendum to privacy policies over the years, dictating what specific data companies store and how that data is used for marketing.

The year 2022 will define privacy laws.

We’re entering an era of technological responsibility because anyone who visits your website can allow (or disallow) how you aggregate and use their data.
Companies now have both a legal liability and a corporate standard they must maintain - not only can a company’s data collection be shut down by the government, but the companies who run advertising platforms can as well.
Predominantly, digital marketers spend money through Facebook, Instagram, and Google. Because these platforms are all run by just two companies (Meta and Google), you must comply with their standards to maintain website traffic.

First-party cookie versus third-party cookie:

First-party cookies are stored from a website the user visits directly, like when you search for products on Amazon.
Third-party data is data tracked from another domain. So, if Amazon (hypothetically) sold your data to another company, that would be third-party cookies.
Consumers tend to like first-party cookies because they directly benefit the user. With Amazon, it’s helpful to see recommended products and recent searches because of the data they collect.

In 2023, Google Chrome (which accounts for 80% of data traffic) will completely phase out third-party cookies.

This will bring a fundamental shift in developing digital campaigns. Marketers will have to adjust how they spend digital advertising dollars without precedent to rely on for successful campaigns.

Strategies for companies to start implementing:

It comes down to where you get your data. Are you collecting data directly from a source or buying it from elsewhere?
If the latter, that decision might no longer be an option. Take practical measures to prepare and stop relying exclusively on third-party data.
Start shifting advertising strategies to pull data directly from consumers.
If you invest in the right technology and are upfront with your member base, you’re already ahead of the game.
Above all, you must focus on a sales and marketing alignment. Buying data is a crutch; marketing moves towards a more authentic experience.

Episode Resources:

FitzMartin’s standardized compliance policy is an incredible foundation that informs you what you need to include in a privacy policy with these new privacy changes. If you want to be ahead of the game, download our compliance foundation PDF here!
Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies and executives pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull.
Order Sean’s book Shift.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.

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Continuing from our last episode, today’s episode of Aligned is the second half of Sean’s conversation with Taylor on storytelling. Check out the episode to learn how you, as a business executive or marketer, can implement storytelling best practices into your business. (And be sure to check out the previous episode for the entire conversation.)

What’s one thing people miss when trying to tell stories?

In a marketing context, it’s a lack of identifying who “the hero” of your story is and the stakes that drive the story forward.
People in marketing are scared to show the negative. But that can remove the impact of a story.
Great stories always end with some form of transformation. The catalyst of the change is what your story is about.

Taylor’s top pick for storytelling inspiration:

Taylor loves Jaws because of the movie and his experience with the film itself. As a child, he found Jaws terrifying but intriguing. And now, as an adult, he remembers the fear the movie once instilled in him.
The movie’s filming was riddled with problems, so the ingenuity that arose from desperation made some of the most iconic cinematic scenes of all time.
In Jaws, the external problem is the huge shark killing people (that’s pretty obvious.)
But the internal problem is Matt Hooper. He’s new to town, his family doesn’t want to be there, and he tries to find his place in the community.
The story of Jaws is about Hooper finding his place while also dealing with the external problem.

Dealing with constrained budgets of nonprofits, churches and ministries:

What Taylor’s grandmother says is true: you get what you pay for. But you have to be careful what you pay for.
Hire the right people who understand who you are and what drives your organization.
Some businesses just can’t afford professional filmmakers. Taylor dislikes when organizations request professional services with the caveat of, “we're a ministry; you should do things differently.”

There’s value in storytelling to achieve a purpose. But there is also value in storytelling purely for the aesthetic.

Taylor recommends the book Angels in the Architecture.
From an aesthetic standpoint, filmmakers and storytellers must operate at the highest level possible.
The act of storytelling in marketing is about helping communicate to somebody why they should choose to assign their limited resources to you and your product or service.
The foundation of why you should pay more for an aesthetic: beautiful things are effective things.

Beautiful things are effective things.

Nothing else in marketing has the complexity or capacity to reach, touch, and affect other human beings.
More than ever, people can tell when something looks cheap or isn’t very good. So why would you ever create something that wasn't going to be as good as you could afford it to be?
In post-production, the beauty of powerful storytelling is removing the extraneous components to create the greatest impact with the least material possible.
It's a great way to a better piece, and it's better storytelling,

Episode Resources:

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies and executives pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull.
Order Sean’s book Shift.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.
You can find Taylor Robinson’s production company at sixfootfive.com and his storytelling organization at arcstories.com.
Save the Cat by Blake Snyder details the steps to a great story, especially on the screen.

Taylor created FlyKid to advance the gospel of Jesus Christ through storytelling. Check out the website Flykid.tv to see Taylor’s methods and organization to help teach the craft of storytelling.

Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need

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Storytelling isn’t just a way to share your business’s stories and information; it’s a way to connect with your audience and elicit meaningful emotions on their voyage through their customer journey. In today’s episode of Aligned, we’re taking a look through the Aligned Archives to relisten to Sean’s conversation with commercial film director Taylor Robinson in this two-part episode. The topic? The art of storytelling.

Applying storytelling to sales:

The difference between bad and good storytelling is the dialogue that allows the viewer to participate.
A good story is, above all, relatable to the audience in some way.
Taylor’s favorite movie is Jaws, yet he has never been attacked or bitten by a shark.
However, he knows what it's like to be scared. And great storytelling finds the shared link (like an emotion) to make the audience experience the story themselves.
Often, the most challenging hurdle Taylor encounters when working with clients is the initial creative process, and the marketer or professional doesn’t know their story.
Companies tend to talk about themselves. But the secret is to stop and ask what stories your audience wants to hear.

Starting a Successful Story:

Start with two things: First, what do you want to accomplish? Second, what information does the audience need to achieve what I want to accomplish?
When crafting your story, begin with a hook: an attention-grabbing narrative that establishes the problem.
Story structure can be broken down into four parts: the problem, the character, the solution, and the place.

Crafting stories to achieve business goals:

Your business should always be secondary. If you want to create a powerful video, your true star is the relatable emotion or problem.
An essential secret to storytelling? The stakes, or what the main character stands to gain or lose.
If you've got a story with no problem, you don't have a story. You have a list of features.

What do I do if I see my competitors also telling people stories?

Testimonials are a popular thing, and many businesses rely on them. So how do you make better ones? The good can only be as good as the bad is bad.
People want to know what happens next. Even if it’s a bad or repetitive story, the journey to the solution is naturally captivating.

You want the audience to be the hero, not the business (or the product.)

You want the highest possible production value you can afford.
If you want your brand to appeal to your target audience, you need to create messages that look valuable.
For smaller companies and organizations, you probably don’t need to (and can’t) spend $2 million on a TV commercial. But companies like Coca-Cola have to because they’re selling more than sugar and water; they’re selling a brand, lifestyle, and identity.

Storytelling is a business tool that can draw more value from your marketplace.

Your marketing message should look like the brand you aspire to be, not who you currently are.
The customer should be the hero, not your business. By demonstrating what is at stake, you’ll keep people invested in the outcome.
But also, just don’t overthink it. The art of storytelling is very simple, and if you understand the simple elements of a great story, you’ll be successful.

Episode Resources:

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies and executives pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull.
Order Sean’s book Shift.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.
You can find Taylor Robinson’s production company at sixfootfive.com and his storytelling organization at arcstories.com.

Save the Cat by Blake Snyder details the steps to a great story, especially on the screen.

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On today’s episode of Aligned, we’re rerunning a fan-favorite episode featuring Sean’s interview with Luke Allen, President of OHD, about finding, developing, and retaining A-level employees. As we enter the new year, fostering positive relationships with your team is critical to creating the culture and atmosphere that retains them.

The development process begins when you attract people.

In the hiring process, you paint a picture of their future with your company. Onboarding should execute that plan.
Luke’s company onboarding process begins long before the new employee starts. His company builds a profile for each new employee, so everyone knows the new hire before they walk through the door.
The new hire also receives a mentor, an existing employee, who reaches out to the new hire before they start to answer questions and provide support.
The new employee’s first week is meticulously scheduled, so they know what they’ll be doing and who they’ll be with.

Marketing is an onboarding key player.

Marketing impacts how a new employee perceives the company. Therefore, marketers should create not just customers who are raving fans but also employees.
Employees should want to share company details with their friends and promote the brand they work for.
Companies that don’t foster these relationships lose top performers because people want to know their value. They want to see that they’re important.
Marketing should customize their outreach by each person and understand what people employees care about. (It’s not always around money.)

Overcoming onboarding and hiring challenges:

Don’t lower expectations for C-level employees. Instead, be clear about the demands and provide encouragement and support to help them move up.
When you’re attracting talent, share expectations early on. Sales training and consultants can fix ability, but they can’t fix culture. You need to ensure people like and want to work in the culture you create.
Many companies find employees who act as lone wolves, operating according to their own set of rules. These employees might get pushed out of success (even if they're successful) due to company culture. Your team will notice if one member isn’t held to the same standard as everyone else.
As salespeople grow in revenue, they grow in control (and thus fear change.) Executives can be held hostage by that kind of seller. Having multiple candidates eases that pressure because your team will be less likely to push against the process.

Aligned Episode Resources:

FitzMartin is all about a sales-first culture and a solid sales culture as well. We want you to find new ways to leverage marketing and sales.
Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies and executives looking for new ways to leverage sales and marketing for more revenue.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.

You can also connect with Luke Allen on LinkedIn.

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B2B professionals often focus exclusively on revenue gain and cost reduction as ways to provide value to customers, overlooking an incredibly useful value proposition: emotional value. In today’s episode of Aligned, Sean discusses the importance of delivering value to customers to drive sales, utilizing several frameworks to understand just how you can develop and showcase value as an organization.

Value is nuanced.

Value seems like a simple concept, but it’s remarkably complex. Formulaically, value is simply benefits divided by costs.
However, in application, it’s meeting the customer's unmet needs, wants, and demands. These can be divided into four categories: functional, monetary, social, or psychological.
In An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nature, author Adam Smith describes what is now called the paradox of value: “[T]he things that have the greatest value in use frequently have little or no value in exchange. On the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange frequently have little or no value in use.”
Water is critical for life but cheap to procure. Conversely, diamonds have little utility but possess a tremendously high exchange value.
The value triad states that there are three ways we can offer value to a customer: revenue gain, cost reduction, and emotional contribution.

The untapped benefits of providing emotional value:

Revenue gain and cost reduction are more tangible because they translate easily to money, while emotional contribution is subjective.
Emotional contribution, or emotional value, uses the customer’s past experiences, brand perception, social power, product packaging, and other aspects to draw unique but definitive value to the individual rather than the company.
We tend to market and sell on revenue gain and cost reduction, making emotional value the most significant place for growth.
For example, we could help purchasers gain visible wins that make them appear more valuable to their company.
If you’re late in a deal and the prospect asks you to give more, don’t do it by reducing the price. Instead, consider reducing the risk for the buyer.

Episode resources

Find FitzMartin at our website, or connect with Sean Doyle on LinkedIn.
To learn more about the paradox of value, grab Adam Smith’s book, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nature.
You can find the Aligned podcast on our website, Spotify, and Apple Podcast.

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In today’s episode of Aligned, Sean is pulling a fan-favorite episode from the archives: his conversation with Luke Allen about how to attract, develop and retain talent. Luke Allen is the CEO of OHD, an international company specializing in inside sales, outside sales, and sales reps.

The proactive attraction of talent is key.

What if you lose someone who is a key player on your team right now? How do you replace that person without it impacting your business?
Particularly for sales teams where each member has deep expertise in a topic, just one person’s departure can result in a point of failure.
Assess your team to determine the different roles and then proactively build a network of other key people who fit your culture and expectations.
Begin the work of finding great people, even if you don’t have openings at that time.

Don’t wait until you’re hiring to begin the search.

Stay in touch with people you interviewed but couldn’t hire. Develop relationships with them because they can become valuable assets later down the line.
By developing relationships with star performers, even if they don’t work at your company, you’re setting a precedent and company culture that respects and fosters good talent.
Identify the financial, personal, and strategic pains people have, and use those in your hiring. Focusing solely on financial pain is a mistake.
People want to know before they sign on how you’ll develop them and further their career aspirations, so communicate that upfront.
If your people don’t talk to you about their lives, that’s a blind spot you can’t protect your business from.

By anticipating changes in staffing, you can avoid additional costs, consultancies, and downtime due to vacant positions. While this process will never be perfect, limiting last-minute scenarios is an excellent practice for any company to adopt.

“Proactively Seek Great Talent” episode resources:

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies and executives pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.
You can connect with Luke Allen on LinkedIn.

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The ultimate goal for salespeople is pretty simple - to close more deals. But how do we make that happen? Today’s episode of Aligned is a rerun of Sean’s guest appearance on The Sales Evangelist Podcast hosted by Donald Kelly. The pair discusses the science-based approach to sales and marketing (and the alignment between the two) that Fitzmartin specializes in to drive revenue for clients.

The idea of a science-based framework:

Most of us love superheroes (who today isn’t a devout Marvel fan?) As the last touch, salespeople are considered the hero for most clients in the business world.
While a sales team might complain about bad leads, science has a different view. 80% of leads are in some degree of consideration.
Behavioral science is the transtheoretical theorem of behavioral change, according to Prochaska & DiClemente: there’s more to human behavior than awareness.
Sean’s pro tip: When interviewing an ad agency, ask them what the most effective marketing approach is just before closing a deal.
A good marketer knows how to impact a deal throughout the sales process.

Looking back/looking forward:

From a marketing and sales perspective, there are specific ways to help when customers want to move forward.
Scientific research has determined nine processes across all forms of behavioral science that allow people to move forward, but only at specific places.
When people are contemplating a purchase, they go to your website. However, just because the prospects haven’t bought doesn’t mean they forget your company and their needs.
Awareness isn’t everything; consumers need a later stage process to finalize their decision.
Marketers need to help people move from contemplation to preparation and eventually to action.

Episode resources:

Follow Sean M. Doyle on LinkedIn and visit his website. You can also get his book, Shift, for free by clicking this link.
Speak with Donald directly on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook about any sales concerns.
The book Changing for Good: A Revolutionary Six-Stage Program for Overcoming Bad Habits and Moving Your Life Positively Forward by James O. Prochaska talks about the change of behavior applicable to everyone who seeks to change.

Audio provided by Free SFX and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and produced by Brightseed and Hill.

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On today’s episode of Aligned, we’re pulling out an all-time favorite episode featuring our first episode with Will Riley that benefits virtually any business owner looking for simple changes that can lead to high impact across your business’s performance. The secret? Revenue operations!

LinkedIn did a study last year that found that job titles with “revenue” in the title spiked up to 87 percent last year.
Marketing in the last four decades has probably evolved faster than any other industry, and marketing is having to shift again.
In a 30-year career, the power has shifted from belonging solely to sales so that consumers can go around the sales team now to get information. The consumer has more power.
Marketing evolved from creators of brand and art to integrate more deeply into operations.
Sales will always be what closes deals, but for many years there was no communication between the two elements. Technology stepped in to connect the two and overcome the lack of alignment.
We live in a rich technical environment now, and rev ops seeks to connect all the dots among technology.
Customer success became part of the dialogue. Now, these programs are being innovated more than ever.
Businesses are buying more tech to automate systems and processes and make more money, but it isn’t enough. It’s important to understand how the technology will produce more leads, generate a higher close rate, and continue with upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Rev ops breaks down silos and helps integrate different departments. Three different departments may have three different goals with three different objectives, and rev ops will apply a new operational framework to outline how they should be performing.
Misalignment has a hidden cost that creates difficulties. It leaves teams working harder than they need to.

Supporting data

Fifty percent of sales time is wasted on poor prospects and bad leads.
Sixty-five percent of CMOs can’t measure ROI of marketing activities across multiple channels.
Ninety-five percent of buyers buy from someone who gives them content at each stage of the buyers’ journey.
Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads at 33 percent lower cost.
Tightly-aligned companies are achieving revenue growth 24 percent faster and 20 percent faster EBITDA profit growth.
Misalignment between sales and marketing technologies cost B2B companies 20 percent of revenue more per year.
Twelve percent of B2B buyers want to meet in-person with a sales rep but 71 percent start their process with unbranded research. We put all this effort into the sales rep and 12 percent are starting their decision there.
Sometimes customers mask their value and hide from salespeople because they aren’t ready to talk to them yet. The result is poor lead quality. Rev ops will solve that problem by aligning marketing and sales.
Rev ops is marketing, sales, and training and it must have buy-in from all departments.
Sometimes it’s easier to hire a third-party firm to focus on the areas of current operations, enablement opportunities, future toolset, and areas where you can make more and spend less.
Rev ops only work if there’s an internal team left behind after the third-party rev ops team departs.
Small-to-middle businesses can also elevate their revenues, and data shows that large companies get about a 10 percent lift, and small companies can get about a 20 percent annual growth rate with the integration of rev ops.
Smaller businesses are more agile and it’s easier to change the culture. As a result, they are better able to leverage this tool.

“The Power of Rev Ops for Small-to-Middle Business” episode resources:

Download FitzMartin’s Cognitive Marketing Framework, which will apply to anybody’s sales pipeline.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.
You can also connect with Will Riley on LinkedIn.

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies; executives of rapidly growing businesses; and executives who are pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull. FitzMartin is a sales-first company that is driven by those things, and we want to pursue those things, and we know that you do, too.

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We know It goes against the typical belief. So how does structure liberate creativity? For any group of people, whether an acting troupe, a film set, or a marketing department, operating within a framework is the key to creating content that best reaches your set goals. And on today’s episode of Aligned, Sean is joined by actor, writer, producer, coach, and speaker Michael Allosso to discuss why structure doesn’t limit creativity; it liberates it.

It’s one of the most overused phrases in the English language: think outside the box.

You need the box, and you need a direction. Otherwise, how will you know when you’ve accomplished your goals?
In 2009, Michael worked on the Pink Panther 2 movie with actor and producer Steve Martin. While Michael was in just three scenes throughout the film, he had to endure five callbacks for the role.
In auditions, the best directors are the ones who provide a structure to act within. The bad ones don’t. Boundaries serve as guidelines to give people a space to operate within.

There are many different types of boundaries.

Whether it’s a physical, mental, or another type of boundary like time, boundaries motivate you to be excellent and find unexpected solutions to problems.
We as leaders forget to ask the most crucial question: what is the objective?
People in teams might have different objectives, especially across departments.
Communicating what needs to be done is a structure necessary for creating what best supports objectives, especially when multiple objectives are in place.

Do not have a meeting if you don’t have an objective.

If you don’t know the objective, how can you properly prepare for a meeting or presentation? Your thinking should’ve come before you came into the room.
If you want better answers in those meetings, give boundaries to your marketing department. It won’t constrain the results you get; it expands them.
Solving problems doesn’t happen in a given moment; it happens organically.

Episode Resources:

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies and executives pursuing growth or looking for new levers to pull.
Read more about cognitive marketing on FitzMartin’s website.
Order Sean’s book Shift for practical, business-driven ideas for marketing executives.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.

To get in contact with Michael, connect with his website michaelallosso.com. His website details 35 secret weapons that make for a great communicator. He might be bad at doing the dishes, but his website has excellent content. (And we’ll count that as a net-positive.)

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In the conclusion of Sean’s series with Blue Ridge’s CMO, Ed Rusch, Ed and Sean discuss the importance of incrementalism. In a field filled with explosive growth, particularly one burgeoning with new technology, tactics, and strategies, finding a route to sustainable but progresive growth is necessary.

Consider how customers buy technology today:

The days of multi-million dollar tech implementations and installations are quickly dying.
When you look at how people buy software and services today, buying capabilities are specific to what the company needs: rapid deployment. This is indicative of a broader mindset; people want to experience value over time.
The number of marketing technology platforms is growing fast, with nearly 10,000 platforms offered to help with different services. How do you break that down?
You throw away the technology component and focus on the buyer.

When is it okay to apply incrementalism versus just getting it done?

You pivot internally for your clients to determine what strategies and platforms would be most effective. So, why wouldn’t you do that for yourself?
Think along those lines, drive meaningful value, and address acute pains within your organization. (For more information about addressing acute pains, check out the previous episode.)
Select the right technology solution for where you’re at in this moment. Don’t go from 0% to 100% overnight. Instead, pick the solution knowing that it might not be the right solution for you two or three years later.
If your success relies on a heavy adoption that needs high degrees of support, you might find yourself asking the same questions you started with (which you definitely don’t want.) Make sure the platfrom is something your company is able to implement successfully.

Fear in the modern marketplace.

Whether it’s a recession, a pandemic, or any other factor, there is invariably something injecting fear into the marketplace. (That’s just the way life works.)
Whatever your role is in your company, do it with confidence and be a genuine business partner for the functions of your organization.
Learn and understand how to hold a conversation that even the finance level, board level, or private equity world would understand.
If you’re a marketer and are unsure how to do that, just ask! People will respect you for asking and learning more about what other people do.

Ed’s final takeaways:

COVID forced people to overlook the depth of conversation that would’ve typically occurred. Leading a company and being unafraid to ask questions will help your company move forward.
Have the clarity, passion, and power to impact your organization, and you’ll find success.
Demand more from your marketing. And to demand more, you must understand what it is that you really should be demanding.

Episode Resources:

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies and executives pursuing growth or looking for new levers to pull.
Read more about cognitive marketing on FitzMartin’s website.
Order Sean’s book Shift.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.

To get in contact with Ed, connect with him on LinkedIn.

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Marketing has universal truths that guide how to operate best to marketing initiatives. Today’s episode of Aligned is a continuation of our conversation with guest Ed Rusch. He and Sean discuss how these truths, which Ed discovered by working in the supply chain for oil and gas, can be applied for any marketing strategy.

These marketing truths can be applied to everyone.

Marketers love to say their industry is different and an exception to the rule. But Ed has yet to find an industry where that is the case.
The key is identifying the patterns and seeing how you can successfully apply those principles to the company to inspire evolution and forward movement.
A core principle of these truths is macroeconomics - the study of the aggregate of how economics behaves.

The Baltic Dry:

As a B2B marketer, Sean follows the Baltic Dry to see some of the nuance and intricacies of modern transoceanic shipping and its effect on the economy.
The Baltic Dry Exchange Index is a benchmark for the price of moving major raw materials by sea. Essentially, it’s how much stuff is floating around on boats.
There are regular spikes and fluctuations (just like anything else) because many companies rely on transoceanic shipping to create, build, or sell their products.
The challenge for marketers is taking this complex process and distilling it into a simple explanation.
You want to articulate a journey forward in a way that’s done for a business mindset.

Pain Mapping - Humans do anything to avoid pain.

Everyone has a threshold to manage pain. To sell or convince someone of a particular point, your message (as a marketer) needs to diminish or nullify the actual pain and any transitional pain.
Marketers focus on intermittent and chronic pains rather than acute.
We as marketers need to be more specific, more focused, and better tailor our macro messaging into something that addresses a specific and acute pain point.
Once you solve the acute pain, companies will be more willing to trust you and assist them in solving their chronic and lasting pains that might not be solved as easily.

Low-hanging fruit that you can easily solve for your clients:

Help a customer be a better supplier or vendor to their customers.
If you cannot capture orders, confirm those orders, and provide an Amazon-like experience to alert your customers about the status of a shipment, those are pains you can and should quickly solve.
From a financial perspective, demonstrate an increased yield from your materials and equip customers to work with consumers to maximize that yield. It is an acute pain that needs to be solved because it directly impacts your customer’s bottom line.
Many companies carry excess inventory to avoid production shutdowns, and the problem with that (from a financial perspective) is working capital.
The speed at which solutions are solved is integral in the B2B world, and massive corporations (like Amazon) can address those acute pains immediately.
These problems are solved by digital transformation.

The main takeaway? Fast is not fast enough. When you look at the normal tempo of B2B businesses, they are highly planned. While it can be beneficial to have a plan for the entire year, is the messaging you planned out nine months ago really the most effective?

Episode Resources:

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies and executives pursuing growth or looking for new levers to pull.
Read more about cognitive marketing on FitzMartin’s website.
Order Sean’s book Shift.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.
To get in contact with Ed, connect with him on LinkedIn.

Learn more about the Baltic Exchange Dry Index.

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Ed’s marketing origins:

Born and raised in Cleveland, his first gigs post-college were hosting various radio (playing adult contemporary and Today’s Top 40 hits.)
As he’s grown and learned more about the industry, Ed is now intrigued by the concept of modern marketing and what that means for professionals today.
Primarily a B2B marketer, Ed emphasizes maintaining a learning mindset to understanding the challenges and struggles of modern marketing.

There is still a disconnect in how marketing is viewed.

A common misconception of marketing is its emphasis on “arts and crafts.” Sure, design plays an integral role in marketing. But that’s far from the only thing (or the most important thing) that marketers do.
An exciting thing about marketing today is the ability to touch and impact many aspects of the business beyond what traditional marketing could do.
But because the possibilities are extensive, it can be difficult for marketers to know where to leverage their influence.

A clear marketing goal: make an impact on your company’s revenue growth.

Marketing can articulate a value message to the financial community, which is a needle-mover for those equity transitions.
There's a need for both short-term success and long-term value creation, which marketing can create and influence.
Marketing can be far more than a sales supplement when given the proper support.

Ed’s past work exemplifies the importance of strategic marketing.

Initially viewed as a technology company, Ed’s company had a commanding market share of their industry (an amalgamation of technology and construction.)
They couldn’t grow until they found a new avenue to expand into. And that avenue was connecting suppliers to the buyers.
Establishing this new avenue involved creating not just a strategy but the story and messaging around their platform.
It also involved creating a community between buyers, sellers, and logistics providers (and agree, as an organization, that they were a supply chain platform.) Which means both internal and external factors were at play.

Marketing adds value in ways beyond its traditional implications.

For example, marketing attracts new talent to your purpose and mission. Why do people want to be a part of your organization? Marketing can explain that.
From a marketing perspective, the ability to reimagine your story and then leverage that in both employee engagement and the acquisition of new talent pays dividends.

Episode Resources:

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies and executives pursuing growth or looking for new levers to pull.
Read more about cognitive marketing on FitzMartin’s website.
Order Sean’s book Shift.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.

To get in contact with Ed, connect with him on LinkedIn.

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Continuing from our last episode, today’s episode of Aligned features another conversation with Taylor on storytelling. Check out the episode to learn how you, as a business executive or marketer, can implement storytelling best practices into your business.

What’s one thing people miss when trying to tell stories?

In a marketing context, it’s a lack of identifying who“the hero” of your story is and the stakes that drive the story forward.
People in marketing are scared to show the negative. But that can remove the impact of a story.
Great stories always end with some form of transformation. The catalyst of the change is what your story is about.

Taylor’s top pick for storytelling inspiration:

Jaws. Taylor loves not just the movie, but the experience he associates with the film itself. As a child, he found Jaws terrifying but intriguing. And now, as an adult, he remembers the fear the movie once instilled in him.
The movie’s filming was riddled with problems, so the ingenuity that arose from desperation made some of the most iconic cinematic scenes of all time.
In Jaws, the external problem is the huge shark killing people (that’s pretty obvious.)
But the internal problem is Matt Hooper. He’s new to town, his family doesn’t want to be there, and he tries to find his place in the community.
The story of Jaws is about Hooper finding his place while also dealing with the external problem.

Storytelling is very powerful for faith-based organizations

Taylor uses his creative talents to work on projects he’s passionate about. As a Christian, he enjoys working on projects close to his heart
Storytelling isn’t something that we use; it’s something God gave to us. God designed the craft of storytelling to bring glory and honor to himself while advancing the gospel.
God didn’t just create the concrete world. He created how we understand the world.
Storytelling is the only non-biological thing all humans share. Across all of history, the one thing we share is the ability to understand and tell stories.

The Bible is the greatest story ever told.

The four secret ingredients to storytelling are transformation, vulnerability, details, and stakes. The Bible excels in integrating all of these elements.
Details: The story of Christ is incredibly long and detailed.
Vulnerability: God humbled himself and took on the form of a human and offered himself up for sacrifice for our sins, which is very vulnerable. Humans are sinners in need of a Savior; we’re in a vulnerable place because there’s nothing we could do to redeem ourselves.
Stakes: The stakes are the eternal life of civilization (it really can’t get more significant than that.)
We think about the Bible regarding its theological implications, but it’s also the archetype of perfect storytelling.

Telling a biblical story:

People will take passages from the Bible out of context to justify and rationalize any belief or decision.
It’s essential as storytellers and filmmakers to realize, as we're conveying scripture to people, that claiming scripture as true is powerful.
Don’t take things at face value; take God's truth that he has made clear throughout the Bible.

Dealing with constrained budgets of nonprofits, churches and ministries:

What Taylor’s grandmother says is true: you get what you pay for. But you have to be careful what you pay for.
Hire the right people who understand who you are and what your organization is about.
Some businesses just can’t afford professional filmmakers. Taylor dislikes when organizations request professional services with the caveat of, “we're a ministry you should do things differently.”

There’s value in storytelling to achieve a purpose. But there is also value in storytelling purely for the aesthetic.

Taylor recommends the book Angels in the Architecture.
From an aesthetic standpoint, it is crucial for me as a filmmaker and storyteller to operate at the highest level possible.
The act of storytelling in marketing is about helping communicate to somebody why they should choose to assign their limited resources to you and your product or service.
The foundation of why you should pay more for an aesthetic: beautiful things are effective things.

Beautiful things are effective things.

Nothing else in marketing has the complexity nor the capacity to reach, touch, and affect other human beings.
People now more than ever can tell when something looks cheap or isn’t very good. So why would you ever create something that wasn't going to be as good as you could afford it to be.
In post-production, the beauty of powerful storytelling is removing the extraneous components to create the greatest impact with the least material possible.
It's a great way to a better piece, and it's better storytelling,

Episode Resources:

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies and executives pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull.
Order Sean’s book Shift.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.
You can find Taylor Robinson’s production company at sixfootfive.com and his storytelling organization at arcstories.com.
Save the Cat by Blake Snyder details the steps to a great story, especially on the screen.

Taylor created FlyKid to advance the gospel of Jesus Christ through storytelling. Check out the website Flykid.tv to see Taylor’s methods and organization to help teach the craft of storytelling.

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Storytelling isn’t just a way to share your business’s stories and information; it’s a way to connect with audiences. It’s a way to make connections between you, your products, and the emotions you elicit in your audience. In today’s episode of Aligned, Sean is joined by commercial film director Taylor Robinson in this two-part episode to discuss the art of storytelling.

Storytelling is an art.

What is the definition of art? To Taylor, it’s just any form of expression.
People are attracted to other people’s expressions, which is why storytelling is so compelling.
Facebook gave everyone a heightened sense of expression by providing the idea that your thoughts and ideas are important, which is why Facebook achieved its high level of success.

Applying storytelling to sales:

The difference between bad and good storytelling is the dialogue that allows the viewer to participate.
A good story is, above all, relatable to the audience in some way.
Taylor’s favorite movie is Jaws, yet he has never been attacked or bitten by a shark.
However, he knows what it's like to be scared. And great storytelling finds the shared link (like an emotion) to make the audience experience the story for themselves.
Often, the most challenging hurdle Taylor encounters when working with clients is the initial creative process, and the marketer or professional doesn’t know their story.
Companies tend to talk about themselves. But the secret is to stop and ask what stories your audience wants to hear.

Starting a Successful Story:

Start with two things:
- What do you want to accomplish? Is it to increase sales, or is it to teach a particular fact?
- What is the information or story the audience needs to accomplish what I want to accomplish?
When crafting your story, begin with a hook: an attention-grabbing narrative that establishes the problem.
Story Structure can be broken down into four parts: the problem, the character, the solution, and the place.

Crafting stories to achieve business goals:

When creating a story, your business is always the secondary part of the story. If you want to create a powerful video, your true star is the emotion or problem your audience can relate to.
An essential secret to storytelling? The stakes, or what the main character stands to gain or lose.
If you've got a story that has no problem, you don't have a story. You have a list of features.

What do I do if I see my competitors also telling people stories?

Testimonials are a popular thing, and many businesses rely on them. So how do you make better ones? The good can only be as good as the bad is bad.
In great testimonials, people discuss why their previous service or experience with another company was bad, which creates a problem your company can come in and fix.
People want to know what happens next. Even if it’s a bad or repetitive story, the journey to the solution naturally captivates people.

You want the audience to be the hero, not the business (or the product.)

You want the highest possible production value you can afford.
If you want your brand to appeal to your target audience, you need to create messages that look valuable.
For smaller companies and organizations, you probably don’t need to (and can’t) spend $2 million on a TV commercial. But companies like Coca-Cola have to.
The takeaway: Coca-cola isn’t selling just a 50 cent mixture of sugar and water; they’re selling their brand. They’re selling a lifestyle and identity.

Storytelling is a business tool that can draw more value from your marketplace.

Your marketing message should look like the brand you aspire to be, not who you currently are.
The customer should be the hero, not your business. By demonstrating what is at stake, you’ll keep people invested in the outcome.
But also, just don’t overthink it. The art of storytelling is very simple, and if you understand the simple elements of a great story, you’ll be successful.

Episode Resources:

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies and executives pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull.
Order Sean’s book Shift.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.
You can find Taylor Robinson’s production company at sixfootfive.com and his storytelling organization at arcstories.com.
Save the Cat by Blake Snyder details the steps to a great story, especially on the screen.

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ALI 19: One Simple Strategy to Add Value to Customers in Meaningful Ways

Keywords: provide that value for clients and customers.

Today’s episode of Aligned is all about one thing: value. But what does value even mean? From a practical standpoint, value leads to increased margins, more effective sales, and increased revenue. But value isn’t just practicality; there’s a depth involved. And on today’s episode of Aligned, Sean dives into the meaning of value and how to provide that value for clients and customers.

Defining Value:

From a customer-perceived value framework, value is the difference between a prospective customer’s evaluation of the benefits and costs compared to others.
There are four categories of value: functional, monetary, social, and psychological.
While it seems like a simple word, value has nuance. Its basic underlying concept is meeting the needs of an audience, whether those “needs” are wants or demands.

The diamond water paradox:

Things with the greatest use have little (or no) exchange value. Conversely, the greatest exchange values often have little use.
Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations examines the relative exchangeable value of goods by defining two value perceptions: the value in use versus the value in exchange.
A simple example: nothing is more useful than water, but it costs nothing. Alternatively, diamond has little practical use but is an expensive commodity.

The value triad:

There are three ways we can offer value to the customer - revenue gain, cost reduction, and emotional contribution.
Many B2B companies prioritize cost reduction. But because of that, most B2B businesses can grow by understanding the applications of emotional contribution and how to deliver it to customers.
Looking at emotional contribution, we realize things that don’t raise revenue or lower costs are still valuable.
Value can present itself as social power; it could be a service offering, the product packaging, the installation, the services delivered, or even the intake model.

A quick story:

A purchasing manager is talking to a potential buyer who wants to demonstrate to his senior leadership that he’s contributing to the business.
People in these positions are under pressure to complete transactions quickly and efficiently yet are blamed when something goes wrong. And their diligence and understanding typically get little recognition.
If you can help the purchaser get out of a rut, get a visible win, and gain the attention of their bosses, you’ll make a huge emotional contribution (and thus provide value.)

How can you add value to your clients? Integrate value mapping.

There are three potential aspects to a buyer’s behavior in the cognitive marketing model: financial pain, strategic pain, or personal pain. (The previous example would be personal pain.)
Strategic pain has nothing to do with the dollars of the widgets or the amount spent per hour; it’s how you strategically add value to the entity.
If you’re selling your products and services on an input basis (using the labor theory of value), try shifting that thinking to an emotional contribution model.
You’ll understand why that person is buying from you and what that buyer is doing as a company. This lets you sell based not on inputs like labor, but the value labor provides.
The key takeaway? Don’t immediately look to reduce cost or promise revenue. Instead, provide emotional contribution in quality or services, social recognition, and even marketing leverage.

Episode Resources:

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies and executives pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull.
Read more about cognitive marketing on FitzMartin’s website.
Order Sean’s book Shift.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.
Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations examines the relative exchangeable value of goods.

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On today’s episode of Aligned, Sean is rejoined by President of OHD Luke Allen to discuss the sales and marketing relationship. The two departments are often thought of as a water and oil mixture - two necessary components that don’t work well together. In today’s episode, we’re going to find out why (and how to change it.)

It isn’t just one half of the equation - both sides miscommunicate.

Luke has seen marketing create imagery around a product where it doesn’t fit the audience the product is marketed towards.
On the other hand, Sean has seen sales staff not understand the role of marketing and the benefits marketing provides while still taking 100% attribution for the sale itself.
Overall, the difficulty with sales and marketing alignment comes from sales lack of trust in marketing.

Aligning sales and marketing is a multi-step process. But how can you start?

The first step is a common understanding of the way the consumer goes through their buyer’s journey, and then creating a common language between sales and marketing.
Marketing gets thrown under the bus if something doesn’t work out, but marketing has a critical role in moving potential customers through the initial stages of a pipeline without sales having to interact.

Developing communication doesn’t have to be challenging.

You can categorize the strain between sales and marketing and two big camps: economic and cultural.
The two functions attract very different types of people - marketing attracts an intellectual or “creative” person. In contrast, the salesperson is the chameleon able to be molded into whatever they need to be.
One way to create marketing and sales alignment is to have shared revenue and attribution in early stage goals. Get the groups together to determine the goals, KPIs, and how those goals will be tracked.

Sean’s secret? Don’t undervalue marketing.

Imagine a company has one million dollars to invest in its sales and marketing. Typically, you’ll see sales get 80-90% while marketing is left with 10-20%. If you flip those numbers, do you think sales could perform with only 10% of its budget?
You can't undervalue something and then be surprised when they aren’t able to do much.
Overcome this hurdle by implementing incrementalism. If you start with $100,000 to achieve a specific result, that then allows you to go back and ask for $200,000 next time. And then $300,000.

Different types of marketing and sales relationships:

Undefined group - smaller companies who don’t even think about how sales and marketing work together.
Aligned sales and marketing group - companies with defined boundaries but with joint planning sessions that create a shared language.
The highest level is a revenue and operations group - fully integrated, breaking down the silos of sales and marketing and structures everything within one unit.

Sean and Luke’s advice to executives and working professionals:

Begin measuring some of the hard questions discussed in the episode, like your marketing/sales split.
Marketing should get out of the office. Get them in front of customers to learn fresh perspectives and thoughts they would never know otherwise.
Look at your budget from the customer journey perspective and see how much you’re allocating for each stage in the customer’s journey.

Episode Resources:

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies; executives who are pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull.
Read more about cognitive marketing on FitzMartin’s website.
Order Sean’s book Shift.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.
You can also connect with Luke Allen on LinkedIn.

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Will and Sean conclude their 5 for 15 RepOps series with the discussion of a critical (yet often unrecognized) component of business development: innovation. But how does innovation play into revenue operations? Check out today’s episode of Aligned to find out.

Innovation is integral to company success.

A common thread throughout revenue operations - different people are responsible for understanding various customer aspects. Marketing might need to think about long-term strategy while sales develops one-on-one insights directly from prospects. And, of course, current customers provide innovative ideas you know your audience will like.
The takeaway? Innovation needs to be a part of the revenue operations conversation because there are multiple stakeholders in the conversation.

Innovation is a posture change.

You can have the right framework, alignment, and programming. But if you refuse to innovate, you’ll be the next Blockbuster - the shining star that burned too quickly.
But what do we mean by innovation? Innovation is asking questions. How else could we build it? What else can we do with this? How else can this be applied?
The command-and-control management model leftover from World War Two inspired this lack of innovation in the workplace. Moving to a distributed approval process for innovation can help you avoid this issue.

Idea-killing structures have to be shifted.

As an executive, think about how an idea would disseminate through your company to be understood and seen. Is it accessible to everyone? Are certain people encouraged to participate over others?
Make your company aware of biases. People are taught to see something one way, and our brains will frame new ideas to fit that expectation.

How to determine the most important thing to develop in the company?

Develop quarterly objectives with the execution maximizer system.
Implement programs to generate innovation. Give each of your employees fake capital and see where they choose to invest in the company.
By avoiding a command and control top-down model, you recognize good ideas based on what has the most investments.
What’s the key takeaway from this episode? Shift the way you drive innovation in your company.
Check out Sean’s book Shift to learn how to develop your marketing strategy and skills.
Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies, executives of rapidly growing businesses, and executives pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull. FitzMartin is a sales-first company driven by those things, and we want to pursue those things, and we know that you do, too.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.

You can also connect with Will Riley on LinkedIn.

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As we wrap up our series on revenue operations, it’s time for a conversation about a driving force behind the expansion and problem-solving for businesses: marketing technology. The number of MarTech companies has exploded during the last decade, and they serve a critical function in business models today. But how can you use them properly? Tune in to this episode of Aligned for the answers.

Why is marketing technology MarTech) important?

In 2011 there were only about 150 MarTech companies. As of now, there’s an estimated 7000-8000 MarTech companies (AKA a growth explosion.)
This explosion of new tech options can make it challenging to determine which tools are right for your business. How do you evaluate them?
Before you start scheduling demos, creating trials, or talking to any other company, you first need to determine which category your problem (and thus solution) falls in.

The Seven Business Categories of MarTech:

Advertising and Promotion
Content Creation and Enhancement
User Experience Journey Mapping
Sales Enablement
E-commerce
Business Intelligence and Reporting
Internal communication
For an in-depth look at what these categories represent, check out our blog.

How do you know which tools to utilize?

Determine which buckets are most important to your business, and then look for companies that solve those overarching problems.
Pro tip: Search comparative technologies and look at crowd-sourced tools to figure out if one is good
If you have one tech that fulfills multiple responsibilities, that’s great. Fewer accounts and systems can make things less complicated.

Finding a system that works for you:

Different businesses have different needs. In some cases, you might want to utilize multiple platforms that each specialize in a specific component.
For other people, they might want one giant platform that integrates everything. Some businesses might even need a custom platform that is created purely for them.
Each strategy has its pros and cons, and one method isn’t inherently better than another. Whether it’s usability, communication between interfaces, security, you need to identify what is most important for your business.

The tools-centered approach is the wrong approach.

Finding a balance within those seven categories is integral to your success.
Before you start booking platform demos, develop a strategy to determine what problems most affect your business and solve those challenges.
Upwards of 80% of marketing-generated leads are wasted because of a lack of communication between sales and marketing.
Sean and Will recommend starting with a strategic focus on your tech, decide which problems within the seven categories you need to solve, and conduct a MarTech audit.
Marketing and marketers all talk about wanting data. 73% of people a year ago needed integrated data points. This year, that number rose to 90%.

The key takeaway - Not every solution is your company’s solution. Strategy can drive your business - search for answers to your problems rather than problems with a great solution you might not need.

Check out Sean’s book Shift to learn how to develop your marketing strategy and skills.
Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies, executives of rapidly growing businesses, and executives pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull. FitzMartin is a sales-first company driven by those things, and we want to pursue those things, and we know that you do, too.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.

You can also connect with Will Riley on LinkedIn.

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On today’s episode of Aligned, we’re entering part three of our five and fifteen series about revenue operations. Specifically, this episode focuses on customer success.

Why does it matter? 61% of SMB businesses report that more than half of their revenue is coming from repeat customers, and research shows 89% of customers switch to a competitor if they have a poor customer experience.
Even more important is that a customer, no matter how long they’ve been a customer of your business, can and will retreat all the way back to stage two of a customer journey after a bad customer service experience (where they decide if you matter to them).
Moral of the story? Everything can be linked to cognitive marketing.
Cognitive marketing defines six stages in the change from unaware that something exists or unaware of how something might help you that could be a product or service.
A few questions to ask yourself when starting the cognitive marketing process: What intention do you have? What plans do you have? How have you mapped out that part of the journey?
Cognitive marketing is fundamental to a good customer success program. But how does it help the bottom line? People will refer others, leading to net new customers. These people who attract others provide huge value, we’re talking 600% to 1,400% more value, than typical lead generation.
That's a reference to Net Promoter Score methodology, which is a simple way for a company to understand where it stands.

What are some of the negative methods people attract new or repeat customers?

People are taught to leverage their personal networks to try to gain new business. What’s the downside? When a sales member leaves, they take that business because it was built on their relationship.
That's the issue that we see a lot in customer success is that it's just a one-off loyalty program (think BOGO coupons.) And what you're really missing are metrics, in terms of what you should be reporting on and what should you be held accountable for?

The recommended methods to evolve customer success:

Pay attention to the onboarding and handoff from marketing to sales
But shift the point of focus from your product or service and talk about the customer
Ask regularly - ask a lot of customer feedback and have a structure to listen

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Today’s conversation with Will Riley, Director of Revenue Operations at FitzMartin, is part two of an ongoing conversation about Rev Ops and why it’s such a big focus right now. Sales and marketing alignment is tied to revenue, so today we’re talking about the stage when someone has moved from preparing to buy to actually taking action.

Two things to note: Sales and marketing alignment can help businesses be 67 percent better at closing deals. Any effort that can charge your revenue stream that much should be discussed.

Also, 12 percent of B2B buyers want to meet in person with a sales representative, but 71 percent of them want to start with branded searches. This is why the handoff between marketing and sales is so important.

The handoff:

Rev Ops focuses on alignment between sales and marketing, as well as customer success and innovation. This conversation will focus primarily on sales and marketing because they are the bulwark of the conversation.
Most organizations aren’t effectively functioning as a joint effort between marketing and sales. If you have the right tech stack and the right processes to improve your lead quality, then you have a huge opportunity to deliver those leads to sales. The goal should be to deliver five quality leads – along with the intelligence that they’ve interacted on the web page and they’ve read certain content – instead of delivering 100 general leads with no intel.
The lack of business intel and the lack of understanding of where the buyer is in the process presents the biggest gap in the handoff.
Marketing tends to think its work is done early in the process, and sales often doesn’t trust the work that marketing does. We often begin our Rev Ops work by creating a high-impact event that helps sales see the value that marketing can add.
When you’re hunting large clients, think of them as elephants, address the pain points, and work to deliver messaging that speaks to different executives in different geographies within that company. If, for example, you know that the previous vendor had issues with delivery, build your claims around delivery.
Sales understands the value of pain points, but marketing doesn’t always see that value. Consider why any executive would want marketing to stop delivering messages before the deal is closed.

Closing a deal:

Recent data shows that it takes 16 to 21 touches to close a deal.
To begin your own Rev Ops test, focus on what your marketing team is doing. How are they engaged with late-stage deals or late-stage closing methodologies? If you don’t see your marketing team engaged there, it’s a lever you can pull to get up to a 16 percent lift.
Marketing should prepare itself for an attribution problem: when a deal closes, sales will get the credit, and that’s fair, given the time that a salesperson invests in the relationship.
Your tech stack should minimally have customer resource management (CRM), marketing automation technology (MAT), and account-based marketing (ABM). When this trio is communicating effectively, sales will more likely have a successful journey.
Prioritize account-based marketing. Right before someone becomes a customer, you’re looking at the need to close them. This advertising reach allows you to deliver this powerful brand into the customer’s news feed and it puts the money closer to the stage of customer closure. ABM is expensive, though.
Practically speaking, you’ll want to perform a sales barrier analysis. Map out all the sales behaviors and marketing tools over the length of a customer decision journey. Ensure that they are equally weighted and that you’re investing in the entire journey. If you’re not aligned, none of this will matter. If you’re presenting the wrong information at the wrong time, you’re burying the things you should have shared.

“Marketing-to-Sales Handoff” episode resources:

The next episode will address customer success and how Rev Ops overlaps it. We rarely discuss how sales, marketing, and customer success relate to each other.
Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies; executives of rapidly growing businesses; and executives who are pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull. FitzMartin is a sales-first company that is driven by those things, and we want to pursue those things, and we know that you do, too.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.
You can also connect with Will Riley on LinkedIn.
Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies; executives of rapidly growing businesses; and executives who are pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull. FitzMartin is a sales-first company that is driven by those things, and we want to pursue those things, and we know that you do, too.

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Will Riley works with chief revenue officers of the clients of FitzMartin, and he’s talking about demand generation, which for many companies represents an early-stage misalignment.

This conversation is part of our continuing discussion around revenue operations and why it’s such a big focus right now. Rev ops is a function that consolidates, organizes, and improves communication between three teams that are typically siloed: marketing, sales, and customer success.

Why Rev Ops, and why now?

These three teams – sales, marketing, and customer success – have never had so much data and people haven’t learned yet how to talk and share that information.
If you add innovation to those three segments, all four of those segments impact revenue, so it’s surprising that we’ve allowed them to be siloed. Rev Ops encourages us to align them, focus them, and coordinate these complicated pieces.
The operational cost savings for businesses in that 100-employee range is about $420,000 EBITA if they implement this properly. That results in a lift of 16 percent just by teaching departments to talk to each other.
Audits help find the trouble spots in an organization and create a set of tasks for each area that helps them find the places where they can improve.
Organizations can’t achieve closed-loop attribution until they fix the front of the funnel which is demand generation.

Demand Generation:

B2B companies often operate with misalignment, and there’s a revenue cost to that situation.
Demand generation involves the early-stage of the process before anybody even contemplates buying your service or product, to the point where they are considering a purchase.
Most often, people have a traffic problem; they aren’t getting enough traffic to their site to create conversion. You should always see a traffic increase. Measure that by creating a benchmark and measuring over a quarter to see what you achieve.
It’s not just volume; it’s getting the right people to your website. Good revenue operations involve identifying ways to be more efficient and effective.
Rev Ops can help marketers focus on lead quality instead of lead volume. It can help your team identify what to keep and what to get rid of.
Some important numbers:
- Data shows you have five minutes to contact your leads
- 78 percent of customers buy from the first responder
- Sales conversions decrease 391 percent after one minute
- Longer than five minutes is an 80 percent decrease in lead qualification
- 55 percent of companies take more than five days to respond to leads
This means the marketing handoff becomes very important.
Begin the Rev Ops process with an audit to understand where you are, including an audit of your website traffic, content strategy, conversion rates, and consumer engagement.

Episode resources:

To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.
You can also connect with Will Riley on LinkedIn.
Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies; executives of rapidly growing businesses; and executives who are pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull. FitzMartin is a sales-first company that is driven by those things, and we want to pursue those things, and we know that you do, too.

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Will Riley is an expert on revenue operations here to discuss why businesses should care about revenue operations and to explain what it does and why it’s booming. This conversation is the first of five more to follow about rev ops.

LinkedIn did a study last year that found that job titles with “revenue” in the title spiked up to 87 percent last year.
Marketing in the last four decades has probably evolved faster than any other industry, and marketing is having to shift again.
In a 30-year career, the power has shifted from belonging solely to sales so that consumers can go around the sales team now to get information. The consumer has more power.
Marketing evolved from creators of brand and art to integrate more deeply into operations.
Sales will always be what closes deals, but for many years there was no communication between the two elements. Technology stepped in to connect the two and overcome the lack of alignment.
We live in a rich technical environment now, and rev ops seeks to connect all the dots among technology.
Customer success became part of the dialogue. Now, these programs are being innovated more than ever.
Businesses are buying more tech to automate systems and processes and make more money, but it isn’t enough. It’s important to understand how the technology will produce more leads, generate a higher close rate, and continue with upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Rev ops breaks down silos and helps integrate different departments. Three different departments may have three different goals with three different objectives, and rev ops will apply a new operational framework to outline how they should be performing.
Misalignment has a hidden cost that creates difficulties. It leaves teams working harder than they need to.

Supporting data

Fifty percent of sales time is wasted on poor prospects and bad leads.
Sixty-five percent of CMOs can’t measure ROI of marketing activities across multiple channels.
Ninety-five percent of buyers buy from someone who gives them content at each stage of the buyers’ journey.
Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads at 33 percent lower cost.
Tightly-aligned companies are achieving revenue growth 24 percent faster and 20 percent faster EBITDA profit growth.
Misalignment between sales and marketing technologies cost B2B companies 20 percent of revenue more per year.
Twelve percent of B2B buyers want to meet in-person with a sales rep but 71 percent start their process with unbranded research. We put all this effort into the sales rep and 12 percent are starting their decision there.
Sometimes customers mask their value and hide from salespeople because they aren’t ready to talk to them yet. The result is poor lead quality. Rev ops will solve that problem by aligning marketing and sales.
Rev ops is marketing, sales, and training and it must have buy-in from all departments.
Sometimes it’s easier to hire a third-party firm to focus on the areas of current operations, enablement opportunities, future toolset, and areas where you can make more and spend less.
Rev ops only work if there’s an internal team left behind after the third-party rev ops team departs.
Small-to-middle businesses can also elevate their revenues, and data shows that large companies get about a 10 percent lift, and small companies can get about a 20 percent annual growth rate with the integration of rev ops.
Smaller businesses are more agile and it’s easier to change the culture. As a result, they are better able to leverage this tool.

“The Power of Rev Ops for Small-to-Middle Business” episode resources:

Download FitzMartin’s Cognitive Marketing Framework, which will apply to anybody’s sales pipeline.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.

You can also connect with Will Riley on LinkedIn.

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Though we often focus immediately on revenue gain and cost reduction, we tend to overlook emotional value despite its importance to our clients. It’s a little-used lever that can help them improve their standing with their bosses and that can help us close deals.

FitzMartin is a sales-first company that is driven by those things, and we want to pursue those things, and we know that you do, too.

Nuance of value

Value seems like a simple concept, but there’s some nuance to it as well. Formulaically, it’s value divided by cost. When a customer is looking at your offering, he looks at the benefit and cost of your offering compared to others.
The basic underlying concept is meeting needs. Sometimes those needs are wants and sometimes they are demands, but the customer is always seeking value as they look to solve those needs and wants.
In marketing terms, value could also be called customer perceived value. Marketers should look at what consumers need, what they want, and even what they demand.
Value can further be broken into four segments: functional, monetary, social, and psychological.
Adam Smith, in An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nature, offers this interesting paradox: “...[T]he things that have the greatest value in use frequently have little or no value in exchange. On the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange frequently have little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water, but it can be purchased for scarcely anything. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarcely any use-value, but a great, very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.” (This was obviously written before we could buy $5 bottles of water.)
The value triad states that there are three ways we can offer value to a customer: revenue gain, cost reduction, and emotional contribution.

Emotional Value

Revenue gain and cost reduction are more tangible because they translate easily to money, where emotional contribution is a subjective idea.
Emotional contribution, or emotional value, could translate to the customer’s past experience, perception of your brand, social power, product packaging, and countless other options.
We tend to market and sell on revenue gain and cost reduction, making emotional value the greatest lever you have to offer.
If, for example, we could help purchasers get visible wins that help them move up in their bosses’ esteem, and to move up in value in their companies, that’s an incredible emotional contribution.
If you’re late in a deal and the prospect asks you to give more, don’t do it by reducing the price. Instead, consider reducing the risk for the buyer.

Episode resources

Find FitzMartin at our website, or connect with Sean Doyle on LinkedIn.
To learn more about the paradox of value, grab Adam Smith’s book, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nature.

You can find the Aligned podcast on our website, and on Spotify and Apple Podcast.

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The Value of Culture in Retaining Great Talent

Continuing our series on sales culture and talent, we’re talking with Luke Allen about retaining great talent on the heels of our discussions about attracting and developing that talent.

Aligned is built and designed for executives of emerging middle-market companies; executives who are looking for new ways to leverage sales and marketing for more revenue.

Informal meetings:

If a typical sales rep is worth $1.5 million, we can assume that 30 percent of that goes to the bottom line. So every good salesperson is worth about $500,000 to an executive. If you multiply that times 10 salespeople, that’s about $5 million. That makes this an important conversation.
The biggest pain point Luke hears is that companies invest resources into people who get trained and then they leave for a competitor or a different job.
If you’ve brought in top talent and you have a good onboarding strategy, you must first have a development plan for where that person is going within your company, and you meet with that person often to review it.
Bring up professional development with your sellers. Discuss it weekly or monthly, over lunch, or while you’re traveling together. Use a calendar or a tool like followupthen to remind yourself to revisit the topic at some point in the future.
Keeping these topics in mind communicates to your team that they are valuable to you.

Building a connected culture:

Culture and retention are directly connected. If your people feel connected to their coworkers and to the bigger purpose of the company, retention goes through the roof.
If you fail to build this kind of culture, you’ll fail to retain top talent, and that will impact your ability to make money.
Change your focus to developing new technology and new products instead of making sure your people are engaged and working hard. These steps will drive business and grow the company.
Great culture will encourage people to hold each other accountable so you don’t have to.
Finances aren’t necessarily the most important consideration for your team members.

Lessons learned:

“A talent” people are upwardly mobile. Most of them want to grow, so you’ll eventually have people who are all competing for similar spots. If you don’t run into the issue of your team members looking to grow and develop, you may have “B,” “C,” or “D” players who aren’t concerned about the upward push.
Out-compete your competitors with culture and human capital in addition to good pay.
You can measure culture through the retention of your higher-rated employees. Look at the top 20 percent of your employees and see how well you’re retaining those people. Look beyond money to consider whether they love working for you and your managers and whether they love the job. Those results will give you the hard truth about your culture.

Episode resources:

FitzMartin is all about a sales-first culture and a solid sales culture as well. We want you to find new ways to leverage marketing and sales.
Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies; executives who are pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.

You can also connect with Luke Allen on LinkedIn.

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How and Why You Must Prioritize the Development of Employees

Luke Allen, President of OHD, and an expert in sales culture, returns to follow-up on the Attract episode, in which he and Sean Doyle discussed how to bring in A-players. The next part of the conversation centers around how to develop those people.

Part of the development process begins when you attract people. You’ve painted a picture of their future with your company, and the development side is executing that plan.
Luke’s company’s onboarding process begins long before the new employee starts. They build a profile for each new employee so that everyone knows something about the person before he even begins.
The company assigns an inside person who becomes a friend and mentor. They reach out a week before the new employee starts. They offer to answer any questions the new employee might have.
Before they even show up, they have a powerful perspective of the company.
The new employee has a schedule for the whole week so they know what they’ll be doing and who they’ll be with.
Marketing plays a key role in onboarding because it can impact how the employee perceives the company. It’s not just about creating customers who are raving fans, but also employees who are raving fans. They’ll share the details about the company with their friends who are also A-players.
Companies that don’t follow through here lose their A-players, but they won’t lose their C-players. If you don’t build out a development plan for their futures, you’ll lose them.
People want to know their value within the company. They want to know where they are headed. Share the path you envision and how the employee can best get there.
Customize by each person. Understand your people and what they really care about. It’s not always around money.
If you’ve drawn the right people to your organization, those A-players will learn the process and perform well. It’s like a great athlete who doesn’t have to be trained to be fast.
If you discover that you have a C-player, don’t lower expectations. Be clear about what the culture demands. It’s a watershed moment that will either move them to a B-level or that person will leave without having to be fired because they don’t fit into the culture.
When you’re proactively attracting key talent, share your expectations early on.
Sales training and consultants can’t fix culture. You can put together playbooks, but if your culture isn’t good, it won’t matter.
Lone wolves operate according to their own set of rules, and they may be very successful. But even high achievers will have watershed moments where they will fall in with company culture or they are going to be pushed out. Your team will notice if one member isn’t held to the same standard.
With salespeople, as they grow in revenue, they grow in control. Executives can be held hostage by that kind of seller because they fear making change.
If you’ve got a pool of candidates, you won’t feel held hostage and your team will be less likely to push back against your culture because they know how the process works.
FitzMartin is all about a sales-first culture and a solid sales culture as well. We want you to find new ways to leverage marketing and sales.
Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies; executives who are pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.

You can also connect with Luke Allen on LinkedIn.

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Today’s conversation offers three sets of ideas about sales culture, and specifically about how to attract, develop, and retain talent. Luke Allen is the CEO of OHD, an international company with inside sales, outside sales, and sales reps as well.

Building a great sales culture:

Proactive attraction of talent is key. It may seem easy but most companies don’t do it. Even if you have a sales force in place right now, it’s a future fire. What if you lose someone who is a key player on your team right now? How do you replace that person without it impacting your business?
Particularly for sales teams, if one of your members has deep expertise in a subject matter, that person’s departure can create a single point of failure.
Single points of failure are a massive risk. Even if you have a team in place, take a second to identify where your single point of failure exists.
Assess your team to determine the different roles and then proactively build a network of other key people that fit your culture and your expectations.
Begin the work of courting those people even when you don’t have openings.
The conversation can sound like this: “Sean, you seem to be very engaged in this work and you really fit what we value in our company. What is your vision for your career and how do you want it to be developed? Where do you see yourself going?”
Most companies wait until they have an opening to begin the search, and it’s a terrible way to hire really good people.
Consider, too, staying in touch with people you interviewed but couldn’t hire. Court them and develop relationships.
Find out what is important to that person. For some people, money is important, but they might be able to demand money at a variety of companies. Culture is a major part of this. How can you help this person develop and grow? You can set yourself apart for those A players.
Identify the financial, personal, and strategic pains that people have and use those in your hiring. Focusing so much on financial pain can be a mistake.
People want to know before they sign on how you’re going to develop them, so you have to communicate that upfront.
If your people don’t talk to you about what’s going on in their lives, you have a blind spot that you can’t protect your business from. That is a huge weakness.
When you anticipate these changes, you can avoid significant hiring costs, consultancies, and downtime as a result of vacancies.
Develop your direct-reports to do this with their people, and it will strengthen your organization.
This process will never be perfect, but we’re trying to limit last-minute scenarios.

“Proactively Seek Great Talent” episode resources:

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies; executives who are pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.
You can also connect with Luke Allen on LinkedIn.

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Luke Allen from OHD talks today about sales culture, which has become an important conversation in the workplace, in coaching, and in consulting because it’s another lever we can pull.

Defining culture

It’s difficult to find a definition of sales culture or company culture.
It has to do with everything from people’s attitudes to the environment to objectives and structure. Do you have a call sheet? Is it systematic?
It’s also employee attachment or retainment or development; the softer sides of the culture that are harder to measure like how the employees are feeling about their jobs.
Some leaders struggle with those ideas because they aren’t convinced that these issues drive revenue.
Luke’s company has seen major ROI through talent retainment and culture strategies. He believes that in order to compete in today’s world, you must have those strategies in place.
It’s easy for your employees to discover what other companies are doing now. As people move into new jobs, onboarding and future development are very much topics of discussion.

Leverage social media

Social media doesn’t have a tremendous impact on sales, but it does have a tremendous impact on culture. It’s a way for people to see whether these are people they want to work with. Are they passionate about the things I’m passionate about?
Although Luke’s company doesn’t generate a lot of revenue through social media, it does leverage the platforms for current employee retainment and attraction of top talent. They use it to demonstrate not just that it’s a cool place to work, but that you develop employees. It’s a different type of marketing that’s free, and that drives key people to you.
The proactive approach of social media gives you better control than a reactive approach like using a platform to view a resume. Having more control over who comes into your organization sets you up to win.

Improving the sales force

Attracting top talent, developing and onboarding that talent, and retaining top talent have proven to be universal challenges for many leaders.
In an era of Millennials that change jobs quickly, it’s a real challenge to invest in people who might be gone within a year. So how do leaders change that?
Every company has a single person who is crushing a role, who is a super performer. There’s a lot of debate around whether you can turn a B-player into an A-player. Although A’s are sometimes unicorns, if you bring the right people into your organization, you can develop B’s into A’s.
The more A’s you have, it either drives the B’s to leave or to move toward becoming A’s. C’s are probably people you should drive out. Especially for small teams, there isn’t much room for C’s, but the good culture will often take care of them naturally.
Having a good filter can help you keep C’s out. Include your A’s in the hiring process can help because those A’s will resist bringing C’s into the group.
Mediocre people don’t like overachievers, and overachievers don’t like mediocre people. Your culture should drive an expectation of achievement. Posting a job on a platform may prove to be a gamble for your organization.

“Good Company Culture” episode resources:

Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies; executives who are pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull.
To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page.

You can also connect with Luke Allen on LinkedIn.

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Hello, welcome to Aligned the podcast for the executives of emerging middle-market companies, companies experiencing rapid growth, and executives who are looking for new ways to drive that growth. My name is Sean Doyle. I'm your host. Typically, we have a guest on our show, but today, I'm your guest.

I've been thinking about something and I want to share, with you, I believe what's one of the most critical forms of thinking about marketing that you could possibly engage with. What I'd like to talk about today is value, this idea of value. What does it mean to the executive pursuing revenue? Well, I'd suggest that you might even see 20 to 30 percent growth in revenue just by listening to these ideas and applying them. So, let's go. Let's dive in.

First, what's this idea of value so you can look at this from a value-and-fairness-being-subjective point of view, and that's what we're going to do. The classic in my industry is the story about Nike. What did Nike pay for a logo? Then I'm going to ask you what did Pepsi pay for a logo? And I think it's a great demonstration of subjectivity.

So put a number in your head. What did Nike pay for a logo? Now I want you to put another number in your head. What did Pepsi pay for a logo? In fact, it's important for you to know that perhaps you didn't even want a new logo. They just wanted a tweak of their logo. All right. So, here's the number.

Nike paid two hundred dollars. Pepsi paid one million dollars. So, this didn't come down to a function of time or the investment of work put into these logos. And we're not even going to discuss what was fair because you could argue that Nike paid a fair price. It was a college student who wanted something for her portfolio. Pepsi may have paid a fair price because they bought probably the services, one of the largest brand companies in the world. But, you know, there's a five thousand X differentiation between those two prices. So, if Pepsi bought risk or reduction of risk and if Nike bought cheap or fast or quick-to-market, then you could certainly see how fairness is subjective and value is subjective.

But what is value? So, in marketing, we want to call value as the difference between a customer's perspective, their evaluation of the benefits and cost of one product or service when compared with another; value might also be expressed as a straightforward relationship between the perceived benefits and perceived costs.

So, value equals benefits divided by cost. The underlying concept of value in marketing is human needs. Humans have needs that are basic — their food, shelter, belonging. But then culturally and independently, we have other needs that we would call those wants. When wants are backed by buying power, then those become a demand.

So, this is all important and it's important to know that, as an aside, there are different types of value: functional value, monetary value, social value, psychological value. But what we want to talk about today is a little narrower. And we're going to zone in on the Wealth of Nations.

Adam Smith, in his book An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in 1776, became the foundation of the economic thinking that we still use today. Much of it, at least, influences the way we think today. So, as we look for a basis of value, we can dismiss the labor theory of value. That's the idea that you can calculate the value of something based on the inputs of labor, because that didn't take into account profits and losses. Right?

The theory didn't account for profit. Well, Marxism. So, the difference in form of profit is theft, value stolen. That was what Marxism launched from. So then became this subjective theory of value, where all value is in the eye of the beholder. And now I want to introduce, to this, the idea of a value triad. I think it's a more balanced approach to looking at value.

So, the value triad states, there are three ways somebody buys value. They are looking for and purchasing revenue gain. They're looking to purchase cost reduction. Well, most of us live in a world of understanding how to sell revenue gain or cost reduction. Most of us are comfortable in B2B with even proclaiming those numbers. Studying those numbers, having sales talk about those numbers. And then this word emotional contribution comes in. Well, that's what we want to talk about today. And this is where the money is going to be made.

So, let's talk about this customer-perceived value. If the customer-perceived value is important and they're looking for these three aspects of it, and we want to focus not on revenue or cost, but we want to focus on emotional contribution, we should define that. The first way we want to define emotional contribution is by giving you a simple framework: past experience, marketing, social, service, quality. Those are all aspects, and not an exhaustive list, of emotional contribution.

So, what does that mean? Let's break this down and let's start with service. If you're coming down to a deal, the close of a deal and you're looking for a variation, especially if you've got a business that lives in the commodity space, then you've got to find other ways to differentiate. Or maybe there's parity in your business, like banking or law. Well, you've got to find differentiators and that's probably going to be emotional contribution. So, what would that look like if it was service? Well, you could articulate the specific service you offer, the cost of that service, perhaps it's a value add. You could articulate that as a way to sell, as a way to help someone make a decision in the emotional contribution space. Part of that value triad is service. That's an emotional contribution. Another way we can go is quality. We could go with social. We could go with marketing.

Let's go. Let's pick on quality. Perhaps one of the things you want to offer are different levels of quality. What if you didn't have to buy the product that would last 30 years? What if you made a product that would last 10 years?

For example, I had a lawyer once, I asked if he could study a problem for me. I asked him how much it would cost to solve that problem, to figure that out. And his suggestion was $10,000. Well, I didn't think it was a $10,000 problem. So, I said, well, what are my alternatives? He said, Well, what if I give you an 80 percent answer? I said, Well, OK, I'll bite. What's an 80 percent answer? And it was really simple. Is that 80 percent chance I get this right based on experience, I'm going to charge you two thousand dollars to think about it and get back with you quickly. But I want the 20 percent variance, for you to understand that I might not be right, but you chose not for me to study and think about it for the $10,000 answer. I was very pleased to buy a lower level. So, you could do that with your service industry.

Social impact is a great emotional contribution. You know, I tend to think of Caterpillar. Caterpillar is the largest in that space. But it's really a highly fragmented space of big-things-that-move-dirt. And you could buy a lot of different, less expensive, options from all over the world. But Caterpillar has a certain cachet. And if you're driving and operating and owning and working with Caterpillar equipment, there's a social value to that brand marketing.

How often do you think about your products or services as being part of the way your customer could market by purchasing your stuff? Your customer actually can offer a better value proposition to their customer. Have you ever taken the time to articulate what that might look like?

Past experience with your ad agency probably told you to put them up front and use them as testimonials to draw people in. Well, there's actually a really, really powerful argument to be made, in the cognitive marketing model that we use, back at the stage 4/5 conversion, when someone's an action and they're getting ready to close the deal. But the emotional contribution of sharing past experience, lowering risk and giving even us social cachet to "Oh, you work with that person. You work in this industry. You are the leading group." Well, that's all emotional contribution.

So, business owners, as you think about this, I want you to consider emotional contribution as an incredibly powerful lever. Instead of offering discounts, cost reduction, instead of lowering your price, go to emotional contribution. Train your sales force to think this way. Have your marketing team equip you in these categories, in this framework so that your salespeople are ready.

Revenue gain. Perhaps you don't want to make it as big of a deal out of revenue gain or cost reduction. Well, don't give up on either of those. Just shift the argument, move the argument to emotional contribution.

So, the problem is in B2B markets, the supplier of strategic products and services often assume they only have two options for landing sales features benefits, cost reductions, price, but they have a lack of ability to close.

And all that happens is you lose margin, you lose revenue. Move over to this value idea. And in fact, in the next episode, I'm going to do one more individual episode around value mapping and how customers buy. And we'll get into customers only buy for three reasons. Two of those reasons have nothing to do with finance, revenue, money.

So, let's dive into that next. But today, I want you to walk away thinking: The value triad is important to me. There's revenue gain. That's a value we should be selling. There's cost reduction. That's a value we should be selling. There's emotional contribution. That's a value we should be selling.

I think you're going to see 20, 30 percent lift when you start selling this way and add that to your toolkit. As always, we love sales. Email us at sales@fitzmartin.com and we hope this adds value to your life. Dive in!

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Sean Doyle: Lee McKnight is an SVP of sales with a great background in health care and services industry. The man understands how to sell.

Sean Doyle: And I think today you're going to enjoy on Aligned the podcast that serves the executives of emerging middle-market companies. People who are looking to find levers to pull, to grow faster, to grow more effectively, to make more money. Today, in Lee's call with us, we were able to explore terrible sales emails. That sounds crazy, but he and I each have a folder in our inbox where we collect the worst of the sales emails we ever get.

Sean Doyle: So we pulled together a few of them. Today, if you listen, you're going to meet the Narcissist, Mr. Over Eager, the Lazy Guy, the Faker and more. The goal for us today was to share with you some of the worst, to make sure that you're not doing that. But also, we have a thoughtful look into what does work. Why? How does sales use email effectively? So that said, let's talk to Lee.

Sean Doyle: Lee, let me give you an introduction that your father will be proud of and that your mother will believe. Lee is the Vice President of Sales at RSW US. They specifically work with professional services firms and they help their clients do outreach to their specific target markets.

Sean Doyle: Lee is the Director of Sales there, but his focus or RSW's focus is broader than just dialing for dollars. They're working all the way across omnichannel: social media, blog contents, webinars. They do use email. And not that long ago, I heard a podcast that Lee did about email, sales emails, and I thought it was intriguing. And you should go follow up. Lee, where is your podcast? Where would people find that?

Lee McKnight: Yeah, we actually do, it's a video series. It's both, but the video series is more up to date. That's our YouTube channel at RSWus.com.

Sean Doyle: So go there, check out the email podcast that he did, or excuse me, video series that he did. Lee is a smart guy. He's not only a sales guy, but he's a JD. Right. That means you're a smart, smart lawyer type. Right?

Lee McKnight: I guess. I did it, yes and survived.

Sean Doyle: So from there went into healthcare marketing in Nashville and now is in Cincinnati. And just generally a good guy. And if you look at the wall behind him, if you could see right through there, and see the wall, you'd see he loves music. So, he and I both are hacks on the guitar. But he does it in front of people. I do it all by myself, so…

Lee McKnight: Well, thank you.

Sean Doyle: So, we thought about this, and Lee you and I had this conversation to talk about terrible sales emails. Oh, man. I come across them all the time. In fact, I've got a folder. If you could look at my computer, and on the folder, it's “terrible sales emails”. Hence the clever name of this podcast episode.

Lee McKnight: Yes, I've got my own as well. I like to keep almost every one I get. And some of them are good, mind you, but most of them are not.

Sean Doyle: My math, in my life, I get about 280, 290 emails a day. So, if I take a day off, on the occasional day, I get those 280 emails or so. I had them this morning. Then I also get probably five or six calls a day. And I don't know. I just would like your opinion, at first. What do you think the odds are better?

Lee McKnight: Gosh, it's a good question. I'm kind of surprised, actually, that you get that many calls a day. I feel like so many folks are afraid to pick up the phone. But I think for us. It's so critical that you use all these platforms in concert with each other. I really think you have to not only have those two but include social where it makes sense. And even use things, old-school things like direct mail, which is not what we're here to talk about. But to your point, why you ask the question, I definitely think that people who aren't using the phone are doing themselves a disservice. But email is still critical. It's just gotten even harder to breakthrough.

Sean Doyle: So what do you think a good call-to-contact ratio would be with the telephone? And what's a good ratio if you do an email? And I'm going to ask you to throw out these specific numbers without any advance notice, so good luck.

Lee McKnight: So I'll take our own experience, right? I mean, and as our firm reaching out to marketers, predominantly, not all marketers, but what we usually see, as far as breaking through, is anywhere from seven-to-twelve touches. And I know that's a bit of a wide spectrum, but I think within those seven, I'm going to say that's over the course of three-to-four weeks.

Lee McKnight: And I'm going to say alternate those touches to where you have, minimally (and I'm saying going in cold) now when you come in and you hit that warm-to-hot basket, it's a little different, right? But just overall, generally, I'm going to say two-to-three calls, two-to-three emails, at most. And then you're going to vary with something like a LinkedIn invite, if someone's a little bit warmer, where you're not just a straight cold sell on LinkedIn, which is all other podcast really about the used car lot that's become.

Sean Doyle: It kind of has. I love all the delightful offers I get to partner. “Partner” is my favorite word. I don't want to be your partner. I just…Anyway, another subject. Another conversation. How to use LinkedIn well. So, the listeners of this podcast are typically executives of emerging middle-market companies. And they may be a CEO, maybe a CFO, maybe an SVP of sales or a CMO. So, what I'm hearing you say, as far as practical application, right out the gate is just email alone is not a plan. That's just lazy. And that's the way I see it, too. So, if you don't have any alignment between what your sales force is doing and what your marketing team is doing, then there's your first step. You've got to have an integrated omnichannel — I'm old enough, we called integrated marketing communications. Omnichannel is today's cool way of saying it.

Lee McKnight: So that would be the first thing you'd want to look at. I mean, email alone is going to have a diminishing return. We always tell people we want to see 20% to 25% open rates. If you've got a targeted, well-defined, valuable email.

Lee McKnight: But if it's not valuable, if it's this pure raunchy email junk that goes out to sell, than 10% rates become 6% rates become 1% rates, and it's just going to go away to nothing. So, the first rule of email is it has to be integrated. It can't just be this independent shot. It can't be a lazy way to get leads.

Sean Doyle: I agree. Which really leads the conversation to say, and maybe this is the oldest news, but the sales world is changed, right? It used to be the salesperson was in charge of the prospect. Now the prospect is in charge of the buying process.

Sean Doyle: We use something that we call Cognitive Marketing, and it's a behavioral-science way to break down the steps that everybody takes when they change behaviors. Selling something is helping a person change behavior. I'm buying from A to buy from B. Well, that's a change in behavior. And there's lots of small steps that happen. There are big public steps. There are private steps. That also is a subject for another conversation. But what I want to say is that in these steps, email has a role early-stage. So, you can have people who are unaware that something exists. You can have unawareness that somebody, a business, a service, a product, exists. You could also have, and this is more likely, I believe, a use for email: "I'm aware that a company exists, but I'm unaware of how they matter to me as a buyer.".

Lee McKnight: Absolutely.

Sean Doyle: I think using email to create awareness that something exists is a horrible use of email. The GDPR and the CCPA, the Privacy Act, all that, these lists that we get; who do we send emails to? How can we send? I got an email this morning, a terrible sales email promising me a list of vetted opt-in executives who want email. Would you? First of all, do you believe that? No.

Lee McKnight: I mean, I do get probably one of those every single day.

Sean Doyle: So how does this legislative approach to email impact the efficacy of e-mail as a sales tool?

Lee McKnight: We have a couple of folks here in the office that know more than I ever will, but it's interesting because you know where that started, which was in Europe, and without getting too deep in the history of my company, our company, it was actually started in the U.K. in 1992. And so, I say all that because our president, Mark Snyder, was actually a client first. We've kept in touch with Adam Whitaker over there and had called him and had a pretty good conversation just out of the gate to say, what does this look like? This was a good three, four or five months ago. How should we start preparing for this? It will be interesting to see how that could fundamentally change, in fact it already has changed to an extent, I'm not sure these companies are really paying enough attention to it. And so, they're just spamming out all this email, I'm curious to see what their rates are looking like. And I think it's affecting them without them even knowing it. And I don't know how these companies do what they say they're doing.

Sean Doyle: I'd agree with that, too. And I think, you know, any regulation or government in the United States has produced more regulation than law, particularly recently. It's easier, doesn't require, you know, all the politics and signatures. But the problem is there are no teeth to that regulation. So, we do make an effort; we use tech tools that require opt-in. We work with y'all, in full disclosure, and you all promised us and declare in your contracts that we're using names and letters, that we are permitted to send out. I always find, as a salesperson, the challenge in using an email to follow up with somebody I met. So, if I meet a prospect at a meeting, a lunch, a business, I don't ask for permission. Right? I can still just send them an email because we've talked, we've had a dialog. There's a basis for that e-mail. I think the problems are these big massive dumps of a million names.

Most importantly perhaps, not that following rules is not important, it's just not effective. So, while we're having a little fun with what's not effective. I've chosen a few, and I think you've chosen a few of your favorite worst emails. I want to share a few of mine. If you see yourself in these examples, if you're listening to this podcast, then I really want you to go back and look at your company's sales emails. And if they sound like this — stop. And then I promise at the end of the dialog, we're going to share a few things of how to do this well.

Sean Doyle: So I put little names on mine. It helps me remember them. Speaking of Mr. Over Eager, I think that is my first terrible e-mail model. So, Mr. Over Eager, I'm going to use his real emails, names not changed because I'm not going to protect the guilty. Just first names, though. So, Dominic here sent me an e-mail and said "Time to chat" in the subject line. And then followed up saying, "I sent you an email last week about our potential partnership" and then blah blah blah ... "beneficial for us to partner up on" (great English.) So, wait a second, I don't know you. You've acknowledged this, Dominic, but you're telling me you want to partner with me?

Sean Doyle: I think the funniest thing with Mr. Over Eager is to put these emails in the context of "if we were on a date." So, if we're on a date and I'm at the first few minutes of the meal and I say, you know (I married a woman named Susan) — if I said Susan, I'm kind of interested in seeing if you want to partner up. Do you think I would have had a second date? No. But if you know, if you'll just think about these emails in terms of these dates. I mean, don't start with partnership.

Sean Doyle: If you look at the cognitive model of change (CogMar), you're first creating awareness. Then you're exploring these ideas of potential benefits and then you want to go through a phase that allows you to explore what would a partnership look like. But at that point, I'm in charge as the buyer of that whole process, of that journey. So terrible. Mr. Over Eager here, starting with a proposal of marriage. Slow down Dominic, just pump the brakes.

Lee McKnight: Yeah. I mean that "I want to partner with you", and you mention it in the beginning, has become so pervasive. And again, I love the word you used. It's lazy. It's just another of the tricks in your book. And not only is it audacious, for lack of better word, but it's just almost condescending in that sense, to your point. It's like, how could you possibly think this is going to be something that's going to work?

Sean Doyle: A partnership is going to reveal itself in time. You're going to get me interested by solving a problem I have. You should know my business well enough. If you're going to sell to me, send me an email that points out a specific problem I have. You should know that. It's your obligation if you're the selling party to know what the buying party's problems are.

Sean Doyle: I'm in a partnership with y'all because, over 12 months of work together, we know how each other works. And actually, it's both ways. You're evaluating me. I'm evaluating you. Do I hold my up my part of the deal? Do you uphold your part of the deal? So, pump the brakes. Pump the brakes on that. Do you have one you want to share?

Lee McKnight: I will. So, I'm calling this the Tone-Deaf Salesperson. So, the reason I say a Tone-Deaf Salesperson is, and this is old sales axiom, but it's "know your audience." And similar to what you've already started in on. I'll just go through a little bit of email.

Lee McKnight: I love this one. This is about five or six months ago. So it started out, and I'm going to read little bits and pieces, but it started out informally, not necessarily a bad thing, he says, "Hey, Lee, even though big things are cool, smaller projects and campaigns with our partners are the unspoken heroes that don't get as much back-patting. I wanted to share two recent animated explainer videos with you that could spark some ideas (here's my favorite part) on how we might snap into your upcoming client execution.”

Sean Doyle: What does that mean?

Lee McKnight: I don't know what that means, so there's that. And then also, and this is where I'm going to get a little pedantic, but there's a point. And then, he's got one typo, OK? I'm certainly not going to sit here and say I've never made a typo in an email (I have) but then goes into the next piece of it, which is now a third here. He says, "To give context, we can pull these explainers together in the range of $10,000 to $20,000, roughly, (and he misspelled it without the L so it's actually roughie) depending on the nitty-gritty deets.”

Sean Doyle: So you're a millennial, right?

Lee McKnight: Well and yeah, I'll get to that, because now it's like really you're just being a jerk. But, OK, so we now have two typos and he's said two things that I'm like, OK. And so then it's not the end of the email, but we already have SNAP and we've got DEETS and we've got typos. And now the last bit, he says, "No matter what the next big or small thing will be, it's typically gonna be with our partners.”

Lee McKnight: So the counterpoint to me saying this is, "Lee, you're just old." And that's fair. I'm not. But nor am I a millennial. Yes, I understand the fact that our business communications have gotten looser and less formal. Fine. But, know your audience here. You have no idea who you're reaching out to, apparently, and to say throughout some of these things, and on top of that, to have three typos — it's just not a good look. You come off as kind of smarmy, kind of grating, trying too hard and going a little bit overboard. And if nothing else, for goodness sake, proofread. It's not tough and little things happen, of course. I think to me, that that's the thing. Just know your audience. You don't understand that you're emailing to, yes, millennials, but also Xs like me and whoever else.

Sean Doyle: Let me ask you this, do you think that that kind of casual language, let's say "deets" was intentional, because I've got a millennial in my office, he'd say "deets" totally. Is that OK to be casual? You know, I'm at the end of the boomers, and I would have been taught "no, you don't know this person."

Lee McKnight: I guess that is what's interesting. I was curious to get your take on it. I think that's ultra-casual for lack of a better word. And it did bug me. And I think there is a way to be casual in tone that is more authentic. I know when you and I were talking about this earlier — just the fakeness.

Lee McKnight: And, you know, when we talk with our salespeople here, it's don't talk at people. Talk to them. You risk insincerity. We're not sending in love letters to each other here. But, you know, there's a way to be authentic and actually speak to that person, where you're not turning on this fake, smarmy, whatever it is. So, there's a fine line, I guess.

Sean Doyle: So this is my next favorite guy: The Lazy guy. Or maybe I should call this guy the, "What? You want me to do your job?".

Sean Doyle: Come on, man. So, my best friend here, Parker, reached out and said, "I'm writing from (fill in the blank) to ask about your benefits at FitzMartin, but I wanted to make sure you're the right person. Would you confirm that that's the case? It's been a little while since I reached out. So, I wanted to see if you're the right person at your company, FitzMartin. If not, would you direct me to the right person?"

Sean Doyle: Parker, brother? If you really want to sell to my company, you could find out if I'm the right person in maybe 10 seconds or less on my website. Ten seconds or less. On the website. That's not a big barrier.

Sean Doyle: I think a lot of times, maybe, the sales guy is getting blamed for being lazy. I also think the marketer is lazy. If marketing is sending emails to people who they don't know whether they could be a prospect — then that's just a shoot & spray and kind of see what happens idea. That's lazy marketing as well as lazy sales.

Sean Doyle: OK. One more and then I'm tossing it back to you. The Faker. Because this guy just ticks me off even more so, John, my newest, best friend. (I get a lot of new best friends.) I got a very concise, short email. But it's a lie. So, it starts with re: Update?

Sean Doyle: So the implied "We've been talking" and now it's up to me... Or the other one we get is what the "follow up to my previous...".

Sean Doyle: You know, they're really smart, they won't say follow to my previous email. It'll be to our prior conversation or something. It's a lie. We didn't have a conversation. So, that's right there on the subject line. But then it's "Just checking in. How are your growth initiatives going?".

Sean Doyle: Well, I don't know you. You're lying to me by this implied... just because you've sent an email before does not mean we have a relationship. So, don't lie to me. I'm smart enough to know if I've talked to most people before. I miss a few, right? It drives me crazy.

Lee McKnight: That happens a ton. I get e-mails like that a lot and it is just such a terrible sales technique. And I always wonder... I guess they're banking on this person so busy. Maybe they forgot. Maybe they're like, oh, maybe I did talk to her, which is never going to happen. But I always wondered, like, what if someone did come back and you were able to get on a call with them now. Now you have to double down, don't you? And the whole week we talked last year...

Sean Doyle: And then there is the "I wanted to follow up with you and see if you received my previous message." Now, if I did, if I wanted to talk to you. I would have called you. And I know enough about marketing and the world knows enough about marketing, you've got a tracking pixel in your e-mail. You know if I've opened it or not. So, some marketing schmuck like me (oh, no, that's terrible) has set up a workflow and these things are just happening.

Sean Doyle: I think if you're going to run your business with integrity, run your sales with integrity. You've really got to know what your agency and marketing firm are doing because they may be setting up these workflows and they're probably, the best of them, are probably even doing a/b testing. So, one of the answers to why do people do this? Probably there's a percentage bump by doing these lies. I just think you've got to choose to work with integrity or not.

Lee McKnight: So I had two others, one real example and then one just to point out because...well, I'll do that first. And I called it my "Tolstoy." And this is really weird because what's happening recently, so you get these e-mails that are really long. Right. Which is just sacrilege in the sales e-mail world. But it's usually like a conference or something like that, where right out of the gate, usually it's a conference in. But in the past two weeks, literally, I've gotten five or six emails from actual salespeople — one was 13 paragraphs long.

Lee McKnight: It was so amazing that I forwarded it to all of our salespeople, not that they would ever do something like that, but this is a "you guys have to see this to believe it.".

Lee McKnight: So Tolstoy, because there's all these e-mails are "War and Peace.".

Sean Doyle: All right. Let's go. Two more.

Lee McKnight: Mine's quick. So, this is one I'm calling him the Big Baller. And the fact that, you know, we all get these generic, cute, ineffective e-mails from salespeople. I got one that just kind of irritated me, which I guess is a theme for me on these. And it was like that Seinfeld episode, you know, where they're all speaking in the third person. I'm dating myself like. You know, Jimmy's down. And George was upset — "George is getting upset!" That's me right now. But what he says is: "Lee, I'm in back to back meetings all day. But I wanted to take the time to send over a quick intro."

Lee McKnight: So that may seem harmless, but it irks me to no end that the sense of self-importance this guy has or was trying to project. He's saying: "I'm really busy, Lee. But I'm going to give you just a just a brief intro here, buddy.".

Lee McKnight: You know, don't bother.

Sean Doyle: What do you call him? What was his name? The Big Baller. All right. So, I've got a very similar one is my rap and I call him the Narcissist. So, everybody has that English teacher in their life or I hope everybody does, who sat you down and just — Miss Palmer changed my life. There, I'll be positive. She changed my life by just sitting and looking at me and holding a paper and saying, you can do better. So, she taught lots of techniques and things to write.

Sean Doyle: But I thought my friend "Ralph," in my terrible sales email folder, should make the star student, star pupil here. Oh, wait. He'd be the opposite of a star pupil. So, I'm just going to read how these sentences start. And I think you'll catch on pretty fast.

Sean Doyle: Hi, Sean. I hope this e-mail finds you well. I did a little research... I admire one of the recommendations you've made... this caught my attention... having said that, I think you'll be interested... if you have a few minutes this week, then I'd like to....

Sean Doyle: So, he even took the time to go on LinkedIn and find a referral. You know, those gloriously self-aggrandizing things we all put on LinkedIn. So, he took one, really found one, from a guy that I worked with: "Sean has had a significant, lasting impact on my management practices, blah, blah, blah.

Sean Doyle: So, he took the time to go there, cut and paste and dropped it in. So, give him some credit. That does indicate some of that research that you and I were talking about. But I think it's so funny that it's buried, that Ralph buried this inside of something that was all about Ralph. I mean, how many "I's" didn't we all learn in English to not say "I." Don't start every sentence with I. I think that would be a bad idea to do that. That was a little joke there. Get it?

Lee McKnight: But what I loved, and maybe you're going here, was the e-mail before they sent you. Where he said, (I mean, I'm going to steal your thunder, but yeah) where he says, "I was thinking about FitzMartin and realized the last email I sent a few days ago was focused too much on our company and not enough on you. Trying again in the hopes of learning more about your strategies.".

Lee McKnight: I was like, okay, now we've got something, maybe. You know, he's probably being disingenuous, but he's trying. And then he sent that next e-mail several days later where, again to your point, he makes it all about him again. It's like you kind of teed yourself up, you were getting somewhere and then, OMG, what with that quote that means nothing. I mean, he was just trying to, you know, stroke your ego or whatever.

Sean Doyle: Which does work, by the way. I thought a lot of him.

Sean Doyle: So maybe this was a fun way to yank chains and I hope we can all recognize, well I hope we can't, but if we do recognize ourselves in any of these examples, man, let's go back. Talk to marketing. Talk to sales. Use this as a training example. I'd encourage everybody to put up a folder in their mail client and just start gathering these terrible emails. And then send them to your marketing team. Send them to your agencies. Send them to your sales team and say, here's some things not to do. Make it a working session. Maybe it's a lunch and learn. Maybe you could draft some of these workflows and some of these individual introduction emails.

Sean Doyle: And, you know, again, at FitzMartin, we'd say Cognitive Marketing. What does somebody who is unaware of how your brand matters to them, what do they need to know? What does somebody who is aware of your brand and maybe they've been to your website, what do they need to know? What does somebody who's begun a dialog with the sales team and what they need to hear when they're unaware is very different than if they're right at the end of the deal. Maybe there's an advocacy situation inside your prospect's office and they need something to forward — maybe that's the long email that we need to do.

Sean Doyle: Understand who you are. Understand and research the stew out of your prospects so you can talk about them. I think that's my one takeaway. Don't talk about yourself. If you talk about yourself, you're done. Talk about them. If you're selling to me, understand my needs.

Sean Doyle: My business consultant has an uncanny ability to say, for example, he'd say agencies that spend more than 45 percent of their adjusted gross income on employees and internal salaries have a problem and they should learn more.

Sean Doyle: Well, what do you think I did when I got that? I went and looked at how much of my AGI I was spending. And, you know, I learned something and I immediately fired everybody. No, no, no, I didn't. We're actually very healthy.

Lee McKnight: Yeah, that's the key. Because I think some people listening or when you say you’ve got to research your prospects — "I don't have time. I don't have time.".

Well, OK, but your example is perfect because OK, you might not know the ins and outs of that person at that moment. Right? But you're speaking to them. And then when they're opening, they're clicking, they're showing interest. Then you could do a deeper dive.

Sean Doyle: So especially if you're in services, you're afraid of giving it away, right? So, the thing I would tell a services company is to share the principles. The principle is 45 percent of your AGI should be spent on salaries. So that's a principle for my industry. Now, he didn't tell me what to do. If it's too high or too low. We didn't discuss if it's too low, here's the problems that that creates. If it's too high, here's the problems that creates. So that application is why you're paying for professional services.

Sean Doyle: Let's say you're selling something. Let's say you're selling a service or some capital expenditure item. Same thing. The idea that this product, this machine could do something, or a service associated could do something for your industry. We can talk about the principle of how lease operating expenses can be lowered by 30 percent. Would you like to learn more about that? "Oh, well, yeah, that's interesting. And you're in my industry." So, you know it doesn't give me anything. I've still got to buy the equipment or buy the service. So, you're not giving away anything.

Sean Doyle: So, showing industry expertise. Now, if you're broadly positioned and serving everybody in the world, then you've got a problem. But that's a marketing problem that marketing should solve.

That's an excellent point. And I love the way you teed off. I mean, it's funny, that you and I have those folders. But I think if you are a CMO of that company or CEO, it can be such a great, valuable tool for your team. That costs you nothing. Right? I mean, you're getting these every day, whether you like it or not. And yes, some of them are just complete trash and you know it's bad. But there are some that if you can parse it the way that we have today. I really think, as you said, have it be a learning session and it could go a long way.

Sean Doyle: Love it. Lee, you're an expert in your field. You're a leader of salespeople and marketers and I love the insights you've offered. Love the follow up. Have you written a book? Anybody can buy?

Lee McKnight: I should look into it after the action figure line. But yeah, we have a ton of content on our site RSWus.com. And those videos are ideally helpful for folks and they're all based on new business and sales. So, it was great to be here. Thanks for having me Sean, I really appreciate it.

Sean Doyle: Hope you enjoyed that podcast. We certainly had some humor and good time with Lee. I enjoyed the conversations, but most importantly, I hope you got some value out of it. I hope you heard a few things that you can immediately implement at your offices. The main thing I really hope you heard was this idea of Cognitive Marketing and how that informs the use of sales — when to say what in sales emails. And if you want to talk about that? Of course, shout at me. Sean@fitzmartin.com. Or just call the office 205.322.1010.

Most of all, we want to be incredibly helpful to you achieving your goals. We know emails are a powerful tool and almost always it can be used more effectively. Until the next time, this is the Aligned podcast.

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Sean Doyle [00:00:00] So this is the college 101 episode on sales enablement. If you really are ready and engaged with sales enablement, you've got a team, a structure, you know what this thing is - then just dive into one of the Scott Santucci podcasts. He's incredible. I think worth listening to and definitely can help the more sophisticated and advanced dive into deeper understanding of how to do sales enablement better.

Sean Doyle [00:00:27] So who is this episode for then? I think if you're a $10, 15, 20 million company (maybe even $50 million company) and you've heard the sales enablement noise and you think...I'm going to explore this. This is the one for you.

Sean Doyle [00:00:42] This conversation is going to be great for you thinking about the metaphor of your business and all these silos: sales, marketing, training. And those are the three that are primarily engaged with sales enablement. Those are sort of like little pockets of colored glass, you know, but your customers, your prospects, they're not looking at your company in these silos. They're looking at a stained glass window. They see one picture, one thing. So when you see a lot of this sales enablement dialog being driven by tech, that's just a piece of it, right? It's a tool. That's not what sales enablement is. What I want to see when a company is beginning to explore sales enablement is how do training, sales and marketing come together? In fact, I recently was in a meeting with a prospect and sales was asking for help. Training was interested. But marketing said we got it covered, don't need it. Well, that prospect was not ready to dive into sales enablement. All three parties have to understand that they want this thing or jointly acknowledge they're trying to solve a problem that they're facing. So I would start with that insight. Get those three groups together and explore that need.

Sean Doyle [00:02:00] Another thing we need to do is define sales enablement. So Forrester Research is where I tend to lean. And here's their definition. Sales Enablement is a strategic ongoing process that equips all client facing employees, marketing and sales with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of stakeholders at each stage of the problem solving, or buying lifecycle, in order to optimize the return of investment on the selling system.

Sean Doyle [00:02:37] Well, I wish I'd written that. We've actually been doing that as a firm and we discovered that in the mid-2000s we'd been helping our clients map out and plan and create marketing and sales alignment around the customer's needs through our total cognitive marketing, which is a behavioral science based model of understanding what prospects need as they go from unaware of a company or unaware of how that company might get the help they need from your product or service all the way through to being an advocate. It's really critical to see the world that way. So ultimately, sales enablement is not that complicated. But what's beautiful about it - it's sort of like an air traffic controller. And there's one role that's taking sales and marketing and training and focusing and coordinating its efforts. You can imagine, you wouldn't fly without an air traffic controller. But man, we go to market all the time with sales and marketing and training, all doing disparate things. We might have a common vision. You as an executive might have cast that vision, but you still need the day to day coordination. You need the metrics, need the measurement. That's what sales enablement about. And that's why you should start thinking about it.

Sean Doyle [00:04:00] Sales enablement efforts are not and they should not be on marketing's back to carry. It's also not the sales force that should drive it, nor the product team nor the H.R. team training. We do need executive buy in across the board, but it shouldn't be just an idea that one of those silos have. There's no common definition of sales enablement in the marketplace. There's at least 14 plus definitions. So if you look at the numbers, right, numbers don't lie. Let's look at how sales enablement typically gets built. The research is showing that 65 percent of sales enablement resources are in building the plan and then 30 percent of resources are assigned to running the plan on new hires, ongoing training and implementing the playbook. And then there's only 5 percent of the budget left for people to lead those strategic functions around sales enablement.

Sean Doyle [00:04:59] Our belief is that that might not be the right way to go. There's too much emphasis on the early budget in that sales enablement effort building it, but at least there's only an initial capital expenditure to build it. Then you've got to spend money and flip it, start putting more money and executing this playbook. So broadly speaking, as you look at how do you fund this, just understand that those are three factors. And then again, there's three groups. There's training, sales and marketing. All three of those groups need funding and need to understand what their roles are and how they should work together.

Sean Doyle [00:05:37] So where should sales enablement report? Sales enablement, if it's led by sales, has some advantages because it's aligned tightly with sales leaders. Sales tends to lead by example and gets things done. Sales tends to focus on things that close deals and they're typically good at getting resources and funding. Most executive teams respect the SVP of sales when they're asking for funding. Perhaps it's because of that direct connect, at least in their head of sales closes deals and that is true. Marketing typically doesn't close deals. However, marketing should be supporting deals all the way through the cycle. So what are the cons? Yeah, I think if sales enablement is led by sales, it tends to exclude training and it tends to exclude marketing. Maybe not its full extent, but at least to some development and sales enablement led by sales can tend to look like it's being done for sales. Therefore, it's just another sales program. But remember that definition of sales enablement? It's the integration of all three departments and areas. And each is equipped to do a different thing.

Sean Doyle [00:06:50] So what if marketing led it? Well, that would be great because it would align with content planning, content teams, marketing early stage to some. Perhaps a really good marketing team that's equipped late stage tools. The role might tend to be more agnostic. Cons: However, marketing can tend to forget the skills that it takes to close deals. Marketing can create a lack of alignment because it's more focused on what it's doing and not necessarily aligned or understanding what sales does or how training might fit. So I think there's some pros and cons there, but it's just good for you to consider.

Sean Doyle [00:07:32] And then finally training. What if training leads? What if H.R. is in charge of this? We see a majority of sales enablement efforts coming out of training. I think it's because they have this view to see the universe and look at all the different areas and identify how we could train up and grow and improve. Every department and it's that view, that omni channel view of a business and the way it functions that allows them to initiate these ideas, these programs. So, you know, the pros of them running it is them doing the intake, them doing the higher for the sales enablement leader, for them doing the higher for marketing team sales team and even their own training staff and them understanding a sales enablement plan allows them to hire to it in a way that creates effectiveness and employee retention. They already are core to a common language and used to a role of training and getting everybody on one page. And typically training tends to be process driven. Sales and marketing often are not process driven.

Sean Doyle [00:08:46] I'd also say as a quick aside that sales tends to focus on short term objectives. We've got a cover plan for this quarter, for this year... Marketing should have a longer view (well done marketing should at least). Marketing, looking long term, looking at positioning, product development. They should be thinking four or five years out strategically. Not short term. So there's weaknesses and strengths in each of those roles. Training can take that all into consideration and be process driven. So the cons: training doesn't think like a sales team. Training doesn't think like a marketing team. Maybe the idea there is training could have a specialist who really takes time to learn sales and marketing.

Sean Doyle [00:09:33] So where for you? Where should you have this led? I'd say the executive, the owner, the principals to who we typically work with. They should look at all three of those roles. Consider the pros and cons. We'll be glad to interview to help you make that decision. But choose one of those three. And I tend to kind of like the idea of training leading it. Because of that process driven model and methodology.

Sean Doyle [00:10:00] If I can take one more quick second, I'll share with you what I think are some important metrics that you could start to measure, and this will give you an insight to why sales enablement is important. So if you don't have a great metric system, if you're this emerging company and it's time to finally identify what we're going to measure so that we can improve on it, we look at the following measurements in sales enablement. Quote attainment, win loss ratio, win loss rates, sell cycle time, how long is the deal flow deal size, time to ramp, employee attrition, content effectiveness, employee engagement. And then we always look at sales barriers. We have a sales barrier analysis that identifies where there's barriers and then the following year we can identify if we've broken those barriers down. That's an ongoing process.

Sean Doyle [00:10:57] OK, so I had us wait a second. Because I wanted you to hear these ideas. This is what went through my head. You ever have that thing where after a conversation you think, "Oh, that's what I should have said?" Well, this is the way I got to do that. I want you to enjoy the conversation. Again, it's focused on a smaller emerging middle market company. Somebody who hasn't put their toes into the pool yet, but they need to get these ideas and explore them. So I guess from here, I'm going to go away and get back to the business here.

Will Riley [00:11:31] Sean, you are totally awesome.

Sean Doyle [00:11:35] Yeah. Thanks Will. You're welcome. Oh, that is Anna Svarney and Will Riley. They are guests today on Aligned, a podcast where the executives of middle-market companies looking to improve their sales and marketing align. You know, a highlight today of the conversation was the practical and actionable ideas Anna and Will shared about sales enablement. So let's dive in.

[00:12:01] So we really are rolling. We're speeding. Welcome to Aligned, I'm Sean Doyle, your host with Wil Riley, the Director of Sales Enablement at FitzMartin. Anna Svarney is the Director of Client Services.

Sean Doyle [00:12:34] So today what we wanted to do was have a conversation about sales enablement and this is a follow up to a webinar on sales enablement, Will, that you and I did with one of our clients, who has experienced sales enablement, seen the results from sales enablement, can put an ROI on it. And after that, the conversations and questions came about. Maybe we need to dive more deeply into this. So today I want to define what is sales enablement. Why is it important and then how is it practiced and maybe even who owns it? Like who are the responsible parties in the business? That or the organization that should be involved with this? This practice, this conversation. First question, who owns sales enablement? Who in the organization should be listening to today's conversation?

Will Riley [00:13:28] Yeah, I think it varies from client to client. We've seen it where depending on what the resources or staffing situation is within an organization, it actually is a sales enablement director, someone that focuses on that.

Will Riley [00:13:44] Sometimes its marketing led. So the director of marketing plays a bit of a role in sales enablement or someone from the sales force comes in and actually takes ownership of that. We've not had one client with a repeatable internal process in terms of who is the owner.

Anna Svarney [00:14:07] I also think it varies depending on how your organization is set up. So, you know, if it's a smaller organization that has maybe, say, a director of marketing and a vice president of sales, it's really going to depend on those personalities and what their role really looks like, who might own that relationship.

Anna Svarney [00:14:28] But I'd say it's going to be the person that's the leader in that area. There are organizations, bigger organizations that have a true CMO who that might be the person that is responsible.

Sean Doyle [00:14:39] So it seems like your answers are kind of on an as-is basis, sort of all over the map. There's no consistency. Which leads me to question, why is this even a new thing or is this just a new name on the way things used to get done? Why are we even having this conversation about sales enablement? What is it? Let's start with what it is and then answer the question, is it new and who was doing this role in the past?

Will Riley [00:15:03] Yeah, I think there's a little bit, just as we've seen with inbound marketing or lead generation, we pick on sales enablement as the new buzzword in marketing and sales. I don't think any sales rep ever has not tried to sell more fish effectively.

Sean Doyle [00:15:24] So here's a guy we'd be having this dialog about marketing automation technology. Really? Really. And then two years later, there's 400 options and we're worn out by it. Is this just going to be a flash in the pan like MAT? Marketing Automation isn't a flash in the pan, right? It's still around. It's just not a hot subject.

Will Riley [00:15:44] We're seeing it, as you know, in sales meetings that people are asking for this. And I know it's different. I don't think people have asked about this in years past.

Sean Doyle [00:15:54] What do you think? Salespeople are wanting it? Or Sales VPs? Who's asking for it?

Will Riley [00:16:00] It's usually a VP or CMO level. It's not someone, a director or at a coordinator, someone that's in charge of a department or leading the cause in an organization. When is the first time you heard of it? Gosh, it probably was.

Sean Doyle [00:16:16] I mean, within the last couple years that phrasing of sales enablement and it came out of your roots and expertise in marketing automation.

Will Riley [00:16:23] It did, absolutely. Because so much of marketing's role is helping sales and the sales department, salespeople. And I think we were short sighted as marketers to only say that it was lead gen or demand gen. You're even saying words like pipeline acceleration and things like that evolve from marketing, focusing on the technology piece of it, because if there's no infrastructure, then we can't really help sales sell more effectively.

Sean Doyle [00:16:52] Interesting. Okay. I love the word that you used: helping. I hate that you acknowledged that we didn't know about this two years ago. But that's reality. I think it has definitely come to a heightened awareness. Let me take a second to read the definition that I have in front of me at least. Sales enablement is the process of providing the sales organization with the information, content and tools to help salespeople sell more effectively.

Sean Doyle [00:17:23] So the foundation of it is sharing information. So as marketers, it makes sense that we're sitting in the middle of that because early stage, if we want to break things down into early and late stage, early stage, we're the first people as marketers to get information. Right. Some salespeople are going out and finding early stage leads. But most of them want marketing to provide a lead.

Sean Doyle [00:17:45] So out of marketing automation technology, this idea of and pressure on marketing to provide leads came about. But then and I know, Anna you've dealt with this, lead quality is the next problem, right?

Anna Svarney [00:17:58] Yes.

[00:17:58] So marketing automation maybe was insufficient in that.

Anna Svarney [00:18:03] Yeah. And I think that the people that jumped on the inbound and marketing automation craze a couple of years ago, it makes total sense to adopt that as part of your marketing strategy. But in some cases, it was a little bit shortsighted in that it did not take it to the next level of lead quality. What happens when that lead gets passed off to sales?

Anna Svarney [00:18:27] And are we closing the loop and seeing if anything come of these? So many companies, marketing departments, are just focused on a number of leads. And so I feel like the sales enablement is a buzz word and it's something we've been hearing a lot of and it's relatively new, but it's that next step in maturity for an organization. Sure, it's standard operating procedure. So I don't think it's going to go away, but it's something that you have to have the maturity of mastering inbound marketing and lead generation before you can really even get to that point.

Sean Doyle [00:19:03] So maybe it's one of those things when you're interviewing an agency or a marketing director or an SVP of sales, you're listening for this phrase, you're listening for this methodology. And if they're unaware of it, they probably don't have the foundation to lead.

Anna Svarney [00:19:17] Yes. Right. It indicates where they are in the spectrum.

Will Riley [00:19:22] I think that's interesting. Where it really works the best is when an organization is sophisticated, meaning that they have the right tools, technology in place. They have a marketing department. They have a sales force. And there's a regular cadence of meeting, sharing, ideas, collaborating.

Sean Doyle [00:19:41] So Will, I know you're working on this thing to be named later. But we've been dubbing it the Marketing Maturity Index, and you're building an algorithm of sorts to figure out where an institution is in its marketing already. So what I'm hearing you say is that there is a baseline of maturity, understanding that you need to have. I want people to go to look at themselves and say, you know what, I have A, B and C, maybe it's time for me to start thinking about sales enablement. What would be that foundation? Maybe it's even just technology.

Anna Svarney [00:20:13] Yes, I have a CRM system. I have a MAT system in place. My website is generating leads. If you're doing those things, then yes, because where do those leads go? Right?

Sean Doyle [00:20:25] Can sales enablement work, little rabbit trail here. Can sales enable network if marketing doesn't produce leads? I guess in essence it could be. Is it still providing information?

Anna Svarney [00:20:36] It is still providing information. So it's different. I think the most common way we see it is through lead generation. It certainly can exist without lead generation. It's just a different avenue. You know, we talk a lot about in our framework for sales enablement, having an SLA or service level agreement between sales and marketing. Marketing is going to produce this many leads and sales is going to close this many or whatever it looks like. So you'd have to just get a little creative and think about what that looks like, you know, at the very minimum. It's at least having a weekly, monthly touch base on things like: What are you hearing from your customers? Does this message resonate?

Will Riley [00:21:20] Yes, I think to your point Sean. Whatever channel is producing a lead: a service, the website, if it's a paid effort, because wherever we're coming into sales organizations, what do all of them go to? Trade shows. That's one of the number one provider of leads for them. And anyone that we've interacted with said, "I need feedback on these trade show leads, are they any good or not?" They're asking the same questions when it comes to digital or marketing efforts. So I do think that there is a role to play, even if you're just utilizing some of the traditional marketing channels like at a trade show and prevent something like that.

Sean Doyle [00:22:03] So marketing director and SVP of sales and the sales enablement officer walk into a bar...there's a joke here I think.

Sean Doyle [00:22:22] So what I'm hearing is a kind of an insider tip for the practice of sales enablement.

Sean Doyle [00:22:28] And that's the SLA. That's brilliant. I love it. The idea that both groups have to make a commitment, but they're doing it jointly because historically it's very siloed. Right. You've got marketing is doing its thing. Whatever they do in sales is doing its thing. And the CEO always pays attention to that because it's closer to revenue. And most companies have this last touch attribution model. So sales typically gets all the credit and marketing executives. And maybe this is an exaggeration, but they know they should be doing it, but maybe not. Why?

Sean Doyle [00:23:03] So earlier you said something about a closed loop attribution which technology has enabled. So what you have to have to do sales enablement, a technology platform that would allow you to follow an individual lead through to revenue and then to beginning a dialog between sales and marketing at the strategic level. We're going to agree to serve each other this way. I doubt of the people listening. Many people have a marketing team that knows exactly what sales is doing, where they are, or vice versa. A sales team that knows or even cares what marketing should do. That's probably an episode later for a dialog about what sales cares about why marketing and sales have been siloed. I have this belief system that marketers typically don't know how to help sales late stage well enough. And they have lost the credibility of sales. Sales enablement I think could face a barrier from most marketers. Not necessarily. The sales team wants more information, more business intelligence, but maybe marketers trying to step up to that bar. That SLA is great because it would tie you to a commitment. Marketing probably always gets attributed with "Oh you are all the guys with the earrings and the long hair and you just have fun and do whatever it is you do. We have to do the real work out there, selling and make making revenue happen." And so I love that idea, that SLA idea.

Will Riley [00:24:33] Yeah. And I think to your point, I mean, there are barriers from the marketing team because they don't know. They may not know how to sell or have never sold before. So one of the first things that in terms of an intake or onboarding is you've got to understand your sales cycle, your product offering. What's the LTV on a product? I mean, a lot of these foundational, SVP, high level of data. Well, now the market for us to understand that just as well as they do the different channels and technology on how to get the message out. So in some ways, it's a lot harder. To get that started, because there's just a learning curve there of internal structure, processes, systems.

Sean Doyle [00:25:22] Well, that's good. It takes effort to do this. Why? Why should somebody listening even start exploring this? What's gotten y'all the most excited? The results you've seen or maybe a way marketing has been able to impact in a way that it hasn't in the past or a way sales embraced marketing. What are some success stories?

Anna Svarney [00:25:41] I can think one recent success story we have with a client where for a long time marketing has been pretty siloed. The website was generating leads and sporadically we'd get feedback from sales or upper management: "Oh these leads are crap."

Anna Svarney [00:26:08] But that feedback wasn't helpful. It needed to be more instructive. But recently with that client, we've had a little bit of a breakthrough and are getting on the phone weekly with their number one sales are up and vice president of sales brainstorming ways we can target some late stage prospects that are on their short term sales horizon and getting the feedback and hearing - it's like a barrier has been broken down. And they are speaking to marketing as they would another salesperson. So it's like the perception has changed a little bit that now they do see value in what marketing can do. And because we have become so ingrained with them and we understand their sales process, they trust us, and they are going to work with us that way.

Sean Doyle [00:27:00] I remember one of the that client you also built a website designed specifically for late stage leads and Will, I think you built a way to communicate only with the executive officers of the target companies. Absolutely. And this is a website that if you Google it, you couldn't find it. It's just I mean, it's not that it's unpublished, but it's not designed for someone to explain who the company is or what the products are. It's designed to meet the needs of a late stage prospect.

Will Riley [00:27:29] There was one particular pain that we knew that prospect was dealing with. So that was information that we got through sales. We were sitting around during a monthly marketing report, and we were mentioning some of the benefits of cookie and IP based targeting and how we've done that with other clients and that we should implement that there. And it immediately became an ideation session. It immediately became an ideation session with the CEO. And that led to this whole campaign and effort.

Sean Doyle [00:28:09] And so sitting at the table, sales was their marketing was there, the executive leader was there. So you had this great powerful way to move into which is such a better plan than artists and writers kind of throw in some clever ideas or headlines. I mean, that just elevates us as a profession. I love that.

Sean Doyle [00:28:27] So rewinding briefly, Anna, you said something about understanding what we call cognitive marketing, a consumer decision journey. Now, in our philosophy, we believe a lot of people understand the consumer decision journey. They don't understand necessarily all the examples of when or where specific tactics and techniques powerful and when they're not. For example, creating awareness with a late stage prospect is meaningless. So that's wasted money. But creating a helping relationship or a pilot project to give a kind of a taste and see attitude or deep testimonials. Those are late-stage tools that are ineffective early stage. So not only do you need to have an agreement on the consumer decision journey, which at your company it's probably called a sales pipeline or somewhere along the path you've experienced the process of defining – here are the steps people go through when buying.

Sean Doyle [00:29:32] And anybody is welcome to use our model, the cognitive marketing model - we'll give it to you for free. And it's just a good basic tool that processes or that next level. And that's where that powerful marketing comes in. And that's with sales enablement comes in. And then we call them the nine arrows in the quiver of our toolkit. So those ideas are probably a little bit deeper. So I think we've done a great job of introducing sales enablement, but we've not done a lot to help somebody know what to do to do this at their office. Can you all stay in the studio for a few more minutes and we could continue this?

Sean Doyle [00:30:17] Okay. Join us again for the next episode. Anna and Will and I are going to continue our conversation of practical, interesting insights, stuff you can take back to work and apply to your sales enablement thinking today. I'm Sean Doyle and this the Aligned podcast.

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Luke Allen: I know I'm gonna get this deal. You just know this order is coming in and then it just goes quiet. Your boss is asking you an update on this pipeline deal and you don't have one and you're just you're just freaking out.

Sean Doyle: We're continuing our conversation with Luke Allen of OHD. He is the SVP of Sales and today is our guest on Aligned. Aligned is the podcast for executives of middle market companies seeking to improve sales and marketing ROI. I'm Sean Doyle your host for today's episode. Let's get to our conversation with Luke.

Van: Rolling. Action, action.

Sean Doyle: Luke thanks for being willing to stay a little bit and continue the conversation.

Luke Allen: Yeah, absolutely.

Sean Doyle: Let's recap of where we were. We had established your expertise as the SVP of Sales of an international organization. Been doing this, sales, your whole life and as a millennial, a young guy albeit some gray hair…

Luke Allen: Yeah, we covered that last time.

Sean Doyle: I'm the old fart marketer, right?

Luke Allen: Yeah.

Sean Doyle: Boomer. Now admittedly I was born in ‘64 so that’s like the last year. You know, I'm a very young Boomer. Just this for clarification. And we were having a discussion about not only sales and marketing but specifically late stage deals. And one of my favorite parts of the conversation was when you were talking about something a Boomer would like, right? The handwritten note.

Luke Allen: Right.

Sean Doyle: And after our session the producer shared his story. So we've had a jump on.

Van: Wow, usually you guys just keep me in the basement and throw meat downstairs. It's truly an honor to be here.

Sean Doyle: Well look at the sunlight and enjoy it.

Van: Ahh, I do need vitamin D.

Sean Doyle: Tell us your story. It was great

Van: Well last week, the last episode, when you guys discussed that I'm a producer. I'm an engineer and a voice actor as well. We work with voice actors all across the United States and one that we have that I am now after years of working together, we'd become fast friends. And she's just an amazing voice actor named Kelly Butrick and she the way she got into our business was she sought us out using a handwritten letter, a box of goodies, a follow up email, and a phone call. And she has made, I don't need to discuss how much money she has made for our business, but it is a considerable amount that would get you a nice lake house somewhere I do believe. Just in everything that you're talking about with being relational and being purposeful about making this relationships and remembering small details about so-and-so really loves that team or they like dark chocolate. Those are those things that shock the, I really think that these days it shocks the client because they don't expect it. No one expects anything other than junk mail. And when you get the handwritten letter makes you happy.

Sean Doyle: A handwritten letter can still be junk mail if it's not sincere. You know, if you didn't take the time to listen, you know, and or it can be really sales-y. If I prodded you till I knew you're a football fan and then I asked you about why, you know, what or who then that could be a little insincere. I don't know. I love handwritten notes, I do. They still have to be done well. What would you say worked with a note that you got Van?

Van: Well I'll tell you there is one behind the wall, or behind me. Let me grab it real quick.

Van: So this is from a voice actor who again sought us out online and she'd sent me an e-mail and then just sent me a nice handwritten postcard that on the front says Rachel Porter VO, youthful, fresh, intuitive. And then on the back says, “Happy spring. Hello from K.C. I hope business is going well. We have the partnership together..” I can't really read her handwriting that much… Some projects this year, best Rachel. Just a nice friendly, you know, happy spring. I think I'd mentioned it was pollen season but it was just a very, it was a timely touch. Yeah it meant a lot to me. Let's see what the date is March of 2019. That it's been hanging up on my wall. And she’ll get future work.

Sean Doyle: I thought it was a fun story of a postcard that became worth millions. Well, I can't vouch that it was millions but…

Luke Allen: Sounds good.

Van: Real good.

Sean Doyle: Today what I'd love to, go back to the basement Van.

Van: Thank you. Thank you. Going back down there.

Sean Doyle: Today I would love to visit more about these late stage prospects and late stage techniques that sales.. I'd hate to call them techniques. It makes it sound so clinical and like you're doing something to somebody. It's not a technique. They've got to be done sincerely. In fact one thing if you go to Luke's LinkedIn quotes one thing that talks about is your sincerity and that you have client first.

Luke Allen: Well thanks.

Sean Doyle: And prospects figure out fast if you're selling for your purposes or for their purposes. All that said, let's get rid of the word technique. My bad.

Luke Allen: Yeah.

Sean Doyle: We had talked something about what we call in cognitive marketing the conversion from preparation, which is typically when marketing has handed sales a lead in the beginning. Somebody has indicated some way that they're interested and begin to prepare themselves for a change, that might be buying a new product or a new service. And moving them over into action, so action is this late stage moment where you're looking for budgets. The resources are assigned. The problem is there. It's clear there is ownership of this problem with the person you're talking to and they're asking you, even literally, give me a proposal. Like I want to know what this is going to cost but also behavioral science tells us, and this is a big mistake I see in sales, maybe we'll side trail for this a little bit, is what something cost is not just money. It's time, right? It's operational. You've mentioned at the very end of our last segment that there was a technical salesperson, somebody coming in to help with all those details. Do you do you split apart that question when someone says yeah I want a proposal? Do you cognizantly put out to two sections - here's the money and here's all the cost of change.

Luke Allen: Well I think if you have a product or a service or solution that has that benefit then yes, it's important to lay those out. So for us specifically our technology is new, so it brings some new advancements and so some of those are are monetarily. You know, we need a quote. How much is it going to cost in real dollars, right? But then you also have the side of well how much money will it save us in time savings? Or will we have time to allocate to other things? Or you know however that lays out so absolutely it's important to document those and put them where they're not all lumped together. For us, we separate those very clearly so we have a cost of the instrument and how that compares to competitors. But then we very clearly lay out what the ongoing costs of owning it, operating it, maintaining it and then what is the savings in time and efforts. How does that look. So again, I think that's important to know the customer and for us, some people don't care about the time savings as much as they do the initial investment. Some people care less about the initial investment and more about what's it going to save me over 10 years, so technical sales and marketing has to be fluid and move into those spaces the right way.

Sean Doyle: That's great. I think one thing that we've seen, we've built something called a marketing technology maturity index. It’s a great name. I should get an advertiser to help me with that.

Luke Allen: Yeah, say that three times fast.

Sean Doyle: The idea of the index is when we're helping somebody install or implement some sort of marketing technology, we need to understand where they are in the process. Are they ready for really sophisticated insights? A.I.? Or do they need a good CRM system? Something really basic that talks. So in that journey one thing we've learned is that to make a recommendation about technology in marketing and sales you have to, you have to, talk about all the cost of change that's beyond the product, right? The price of the object I think is what you just said.

Luke Allen: That's right.

Sean Doyle: Well something like that. So we are currently in a conversation. Salesman got into our client, not our salesman. Some other salesman got into our client and convinced them that this piece of marketing technology would be a great fit. They loved how it integrated with the product. It made so much sense. It presented well so a client called us and said hey we need to switch our marketing technology from a to b. And we said well let's talk about that a little bit. And so by the time we took what their software tech cost and we did the conversion and we did the integration and we did the additional cost because we can do, in the technology he's in now, we can do something in an hour that in this other technology might take two to three.

Luke Allen: Oh wow.

Sean Doyle: So you start looking at all those costs the cost of change, the soft cost you might call them, that that really matters. So we talked in our last episode about when you've got those early late stage prospects. People are moving and the tools that marketing can help sales with emotional tools, rational tools, and then this idea of creating tools like that private than public commitments. Ways that sales can make that transition, for example things like pilot projects or iPad calculators or some sort of exchange modeling. Now that we're in this late, late stage two things I think... I'm not trying to set you up for a or b here.

Luke Allen: Okay, good.

Sean Doyle: But the sales gets heightened right? The stress is heightened. So I'm a salesman. Anybody that messes up my deal, that's cash right. I’m losing cash now.

Luke Allen: Yeah.

Sean Doyle: So marketers have to understand when they wonder why our delightful ideas aren't accepted, they're not playing with your paycheck but you're playing with their paycheck. How do you tell a marketer to approach that salesperson who does have good ideas who does have good ways to help.

Luke Allen: Yeah I think again going back to last episode, the alignment side has to be there. So you have to have teams that work together which is a culture thing that's pivotal and key to success there. So you have to have that alignment where a salesperson trusts a marketing person that's bringing ideas even if they don't agree with those or go with all of them. There's got to be that open discussion on how both people can come together and bring the positive result. But you're right about the salesperson is so focused at the end of this buying piece they've you know for us it's 12 to 18 month buying cycle. They're hungry, they're very focused on closing this deal. Anything that's a threat to that is is going to be seen as that.

Sean Doyle: Inside or out.

Luke Allen: Inside or out, yeah. And like a lot of things with your family at home, sometimes it's easier to be harder on things that are inside than out, you know, so if it's a marketing person in your company you're quick to tell them, “Hey, I got it.”

Sean Doyle: Yeah, I got it.

Luke Allen: This is what I do. You know you stay in your lane let me stay in my lane and that also, Sean, to me another mistake that sales people make is they when they feel that pressure they almost overcompensate for follow up on the deal or on the buyer or on the person because they feel that pressure. And some people can take that and that leads them to too much follow up, too many calls, too many emails, too many touch points. And that's something we found in our business that when you have again aggressive sales culture, you have to dial that back at certain parts of the process or you're gonna run people off or you're going to make them angry. All these different things that we've all felt when we try to buy a product, you know, good salespeople have to know when to step that back as well.

Sean Doyle: Yeah I was taught that when, as a salesman I was taught that when somebody asks you for a proposal every second that passes from that moment is against you. So that would lead me to be hyper aggressive.

Luke Allen: You hear time kills it kills deals. And that's the thing that everybody, yeah. So you feel that pressure.

Sean Doyle: What's the balance? I mean obviously you could keep track of things and you could see when you lose deals and get deals. There's some amazing technology coming out of Israel right now that uses AI to listen to words and looks at time cadences and identifies what the most successful paths are. So there's the future of A.I. is going to impact this dialogue, intuitively

Luke Allen: Yeah I mean, to me, I think really some of it goes back to the relationship part that we talked about earlier which we let off with with the note piece that people you know might or might not really agree with, but you know I say give it give something like that a try and see how that that works. But to me the only way you really stay close at that late stage by without feeling the pressure of constantly needing an update, you know, when you're you're just flipping out about. I haven't heard from Sean in a day. You know, and people are telling you you know outside looking in they're saying that you're overreacting. If you have that relationship you really can get those updates from the buyer or from the person inside and really the best salespeople create relationships to where the buyer really feels like they're buying a solution and a product but they're buying it from somebody they really like and they really want to work with. And that makes the overall experience again even better than what most people are experiencing today when they buy a product online or through a retailer. You know Amazon has a great business but let's be honest, it's a very distant relationship. So if you can create that in a technical market or in your place of business wherever it is, the banking world you mentioned that earlier, that that relationship will be a huge difference when you come to these late stages where it gets quiet and it gets delayed and people don't like that. They don't like quiet.

Sean Doyle: Luke I'm laughing because I remember a story you told me once about you as a younger salesperson who called and called and called. Do you recall the story? Will you tell it?

Luke Allen: Yeah well I was a young salesperson and I was the hungry person you mentioned earlier and you know I have a I know I'm gonna get this deal you know and everybody that's probably listening to this podcast if you're marketing or sales in any way you're you can relate to this you just know this order is coming in and then it just it just goes quiet and you're you know your boss is asking you an update on this pipeline deal and you don't have one and you're just you're just freaking out and so I resorted to what most young salespeople do. I just call everyday, you know. And email, and then I text, and I'm calling and texting and emailing and finally I get someone on the phone, you know, days later and they say oh no you know so-and-so has as unfortunately passed away and you know you're standing there, you know. I'm so sorry for your loss you know and yes it's me that's left 57 voicemails. It's really not that important in the big scheme of things of what we're talking about now. But I think that's part of it too of just understanding that piece of the close is you have to be close enough but you can't overdo it.

Sean Doyle: Sometimes stuff just happens.

Luke Allen: Yeah sometimes things happen.

Sean Doyle: And something that was a priority, a genuine priority, moves to not so much of a priority but comes back.

Luke Allen: Absolutely, I mean we ended up, you know, we just they were looking for this person's replacement which you would understand. You know, it's not an easy fill right when someone has that go on and eventually went through but that silence can be devastating for salespeople.

Sean Doyle: Oh absolutely. What a great story I mean difficult, touchy, but great story.

Luke Allen: Yeah true story.

Sean Doyle: Truth is stranger than fiction right, right? When we're working with sales and the way that we create a dialogue with sales about how to support a sales individual's late stage efforts we focus on four aspects that are revealed through this cognitive marketing, the behavioral science. And the four are simply, helping relationships, positive substitution and countering, environmental controls, and rewards for positive behavior. So in environmental control is such an easy thing. So you think about why do I take a prospect to go play golf? I take him because I've got four hours with him. Right. Or more or less depends how good you play right. Or you know you see people who have a box at a football stadium where they get them they get their attention. And once the behavioral science teaches us that if you can get somebody out of their environment then they're more likely to make a change. It's the think of some bad habit you've got don't name it. Hold on hold it. If your environment doesn't change then nothing changes as it's unlikely. So if you're trying to help somebody not drink beer don't take him to a bar, right? So inversely if I want someone to make a behavioral change then I might take him to a plant tour. I might bring them to my facility. I might take them off site to a third party. And they're not techniques right there. They're really genuinely helpful because it allows change to happen and allows people to understand and to have an aha moment. We love aha moments.

Luke Allen: Sure. So these are steps that you're saying marketing support sales in, right?

Sean Doyle: Exactly. And that's the kind of thing marketing can come to a salesman and say I'm not going to mess up your deal. I'm gonna design an environmental control and I'm going to design and experience at your office so that you can walk in and go huh. This is different. I didn't expect this. I didn't know this. I learned that. Disney teaches a lot about how to do that. How do you change people's feelings, their perspectives, from everything from the way the materials their feet are touching walking or elevation changes and sound. And so those are ways that a marketer can have a lot of power. And I bet you've heard a salesman say, “If we can get them to our office we close 90 percent of them.” Well that's an environmental control.. Sometimes you can't get a client to your office. Marketing can build an environmental control that a salesperson can take out. You can take in fact we even love, it's old fashioned kind of like handwritten. We like things called environmental surrounds and we would build a system of printed boards that go on easels. So if I'm sitting in my conference room and I'm listening to your pitch every time a board goes up it changes visually what I see. We might have them have music playing which is super easy with a bluetooth speaker now. We might have them have some food in there which changes the smell from what they normally smell. So you're sitting there as a prospect in your own turf but you're surrounded by the salesman's boards. You're smelling the smells hearing the sounds and watching video and you. It changes that environment. Those are really powerful tools. Another one is this reward for positive behavior. And I know this is a time honored challenge. You've had some sales guy come up to you and say, “Hey Luke I want to do X Y Z or I want to take them out” or worse, you've got an expense receipt and said I already already did that. Rewards do work for positive behavior just like raising a child right. How do you define that? How do you construct those rewards? So you know you're your team knows what to do. They know how to not go too far.

Luke Allen: Yeah. With customers, you're saying. Or potential prospects. I mean, yeah, for us everybody's business is different obviously and how that works. But I've been trying to get a box at the local college football team but the company won't go for it. But yeah for us we don't have as many customers that can come here, you know, so other businesses have different ways to do what you just described. For us, marketing is supported creating this environmental control and some of the feeling our culture and our company remotely is through great video, through a great telling the story of the company, the culture, who we are, why we do what we do, in a format that salespeople can use it and utilize it. And you know from our experience as salespeople most of our technical sales people are really good at what they do when it comes to selling and all those things but the detail behind, you know, you mentioned Disney earlier one of the things I love about Disney is their attention to detail is just at a whole nother level. And most salespeople, you look at my desk or wherever else, the attention to detail is not my gifting package, you know. Whereas marketing they normally are really looking at how does our brand look and what feel does this have. And again, the alignment with sales, if you have good marketing and sales alignment, that end stage where marketing can wrap in and bring that closing touch to really have the customer make that emotional connection and the buy in is a major win. And for us taking customers to dinner, doing things like that, we are for that but I think the customized piece of the video and the different experiences has been a big advantage.

Sean Doyle: Another behavioral science driven process that we see and use, in fact I've even got kind of a fun story to share, is this positive substitution encountering. So we've all made that presentation. We've put our best foot forward with amazing, everything was great, the graphics were perfect, the numbers were good. The ROI was there for everybody, both sides. You know, it was just that you're going, Oh this is it. And then you hear something like, well we've asked five other companies to come in and you're, oh my. I didn't know that. Or since we met with you last we decided to handle this in house. Right. So yeah those are moments where you can design a positive substitution. So what do I mean by that. We were working once with a manufacturer of a motorcycle. Well we weren't working with them they were a prospect and they said that very thing about we're going to talk to eight other companies and see how they'd approach it which you know roll your eyes on the inside of course. But because marketing had prepared me for this I was able to say we'll I’ll tell you what, let's let's do this. It's going to cost me about twenty thousand dollars to do the first steps to build the numbers, to do what you want me to do. What if I just allow you access to my company and we'll go through the first step of being a new client. At the end of that, I will have not spent a dollar more than going through your RFP process and you'll have a real sense of what it's like to work with us and you'll even get a sense of our strategy and our insights. Worst case scenario I haven't spent money that I wasn’t already going to spend on RFP. And you've gotten some results. You've gotten some strategy, some plans, some direction. And the CEO scratched his head and you said I could see he was thinking about all the other people he was going to have to call back and say, hey, I changed my mind. Yeah. So God just gave it to me. So I said, what if you call the other groups and say the decision making process has been delayed by eight weeks. And he said I can do that. So we did it, and we ended up launching the brand of this motorcycle.

Luke Allen: Oh wow.

Sean Doyle: And it was great. It was all because marketing it equipped me with a substitution. Something to offer. So I knew ahead of time, as a salesman, I could offer X, Y, and Z. So I love seeing companies that have playbooks, that the sales team knows what their boundaries are. And without having to say, let me call Luke.

Luke Allen: Yeah, exactly.

Sean Doyle: Which is the old car dealer track, right? That's designed to remove control from people. That's a separate technique and it might be worth talking about that. And that is a technique. But the last the last of these four very powerful processes is helping relationships. And I know that you've got this culture of helping and bringing in people what they need bringing to people what they need. My question is how do you allow a helping relationship but you don't give away the product. How do you allow a helping relationship without increasing your cost of sales to such a point that the ROI is not there?

Luke Allen: Yeah, that's a great question. I think the main thing that we do is that we have a product that justifies and really demands that the price point that it has. So the relationship is outside of that, you know. So again, if the value and the message and the benefit is for the person and the customer of the company that is buying this product or service or solution, you can have those things both go together. So you can have the relationship that you build along with profitable product sales or service sales. And I do think that that is something that salespeople can struggle with on the reverse side. So if they create this great relationship with someone they almost feel they're obligated, or they want to throw in, you know, you mentioned a discount or given away things, or whatever. To me, if you fairly built a product or service or solution at a fair price, you know, you're able to deliver that with a good conscience in your relationships that you have where the deliverable is is there for both companies and the end user. So that's normally the way that we really get our salespeople to understand what that benefit is, so they they're not just artificially saying that. They really believe it.

Sean Doyle: Do you ever have to tell a salesperson look, you've got 50 hours in this gig and you just gotta let it go?

Luke Allen: Oh yeah. I think everybody's got either one of those or many of those, right? Where they hang on and hang on and hang on.

Sean Doyle: What do you do? How do you know where the line is? Is it intuition?

Luke Allen: Yeah, I think so. Some of it's intuition and some of it's the lead indicators that you're looking at. You know, what are the activities and what are the buying habits? But some of it, too, is just that ROI time on what we've invested and where things are. But yeah, some of it's not really a straightforward science though. You never really know.

Sean Doyle: I feel like there was a story that we wanted to tell but I can't remember what it was but while I'm thinking about that story, and it may never come back, that's the problem being a boomer. You millennials would remember. I was thinking about something you said earlier and that was about culture. So when we talk about marketing and sales alignment I always lead with we've got to create a common dialogue and a common language between marketing and sales because, you know, you've read a million things. There's the consumer decision journey, coined largely by McKinsey, that defined this idea of the steps in the processes. Then you get into the behavioral science like we've applied it and then you get into these arrows in your quiver. These nine processes and how to use them. Well that's great if marketing knows all that but if sales has a different pipeline, and there may be a logical, I've seen a lot of different pipelines. I've seen pipelines with 70 steps. Highly engineered. Too many steps. But ,you know, sales is talking about one thing. Marketing is talking about another thing. We've got to have this common language. So that may be a fairly obvious thing to do as a first step, is identify what we're going to call things and all agree on it. You then said something about culture and language, it connected with me, you can't have a culture without a language, right? So maybe I've just got this infinitesimal understanding of culture and how to create these. Tell me a little bit more about what you're thinking.

Luke Allen: Yeah. And I'm sure we could probably do a whole podcast on culture...

Sean Doyle: Oh we could string people along forever.

Luke Allen: Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, that's a buzzword right now. And I'm sure there's a thousand podcasts that are talking about it. Culture to me is the most important ingredient in this overall recipe. To me it drives results, it drives language, it drives commitment and alignment. If you don't hire to culture, train to culture, you're not going to retain the right talent. You're not going to attract the right talent in whatever role that you're looking at. And for us, we get these sales and marketing alignment because the culture of what we've developed has built the language to where our marketing person is so bought in on their role and they really celebrate the success of the salesperson and the outcome of closing deals and they're intimately involved in tracking that. So they see their fingerprint on the deal all the way through and then the salesperson sees the reverse of that. They are in support of what we're doing from a marketing standpoint, whether it's outside agencies or internal marketing because the salesperson intimately knows how that's going to impact their job their income stream and so on and so forth. And to me that that open culture and bringing in the right people builds out the successful buy-in from all the different parts. So it's an important process and nobody falls in to the right culture. It's something you literally have to intentionally develop and everyone has a culture. It's just most people don't have the culture they really want. Or they tell their friends at the golf course about, or at their business group when everyone says well, how is your company culture? Most people say it's great. You know, everything's good and people love to work here. But if you did a culture survey with their people, you’d probably find out a little something different. But it is an important thing and I think it gets overhyped that millennials have more importance in culture, I think it's been there forever. I just think it manifests itself in a different way with people in my generation or younger in that with the job market that we're in now and some of the dynamics, people are moving. They're moving to different companies and they know what different companies offer. Information is so widely available that it means you need to focus on that and if you're not, you're going to be at a disadvantage against competitors or in your market. But even outside of your market with the way people can use their job skills in different ways. So for us that's the building block of culture and it makes these initiatives easier because you had people bought in.

Sean Doyle: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So you would actually enjoy knowing this. Maybe you do know it, but you invest in our company with a role called sales enablement. So we're providing that communication link between marketing and sales and supporting your marketing director. The sales enablement guy at my office celebrates when you all get deals too. We actually hear about it. I mean he'll bring it up. We have a formal time weekly to share good news from clients but occasionally you'll just hear, they got another couple deals. I mean so that culture is infectious outside your walls and that's great. So yeah, that's a whole other conversation. We’ll dive into that someday.

Sean Doyle: You know I think after listening to you and knowing some of my intent, I hope that people, and I’ll ask you this same question, I hope that people walk away with this knowing that late stage marketing should be involved. It may not have been involved in the past. And if it's not, it's because you don't have an understanding of how or your marketer doesn't have an understanding of how to participate. Or maybe sales hasn't trusted marketing to be involved and maybe they haven't earned the trust either. Earning trust as part of a culture, right?

Luke Allen: Right, it is.

Sean Doyle: So we shared a few of the processes that we teach and help our clients with. I hope that helps a little bit to at least give an inkling, a little tiny understanding, of what you could do with marketing to support large stage sales. I think that's been an interesting part of the conversation. What do you hope people got out of this?

Luke Allen: To me, this has been something that I think really the benefit of what we've talked about these first two episodes are really applicable from executives down. Through sales and marketing and understanding how those worked together. We're all in for the same outcome or we should be. So we've got to find that alignment, so my hope would be that people take out of this that there is a way to have that alignment which is probably something that people thought might not even be possible. And if they don't have it within their companies, hopefully we gave some examples of how to start that process, how to find people that can help guide that. So hopefully that's what people got out of some of this time.

Sean Doyle: Thank you for your time.

Luke Allen: Yeah. Thank you Sean, I enjoyed it.

Sean Doyle: Being the aged man that I am, I think I'm gonna wrap it up for the day.

Luke Allen: Yeah, I'm surprised you haven't gone to bed yet.

Sean Doyle: Join us on the next episode when we talk with Anna Svarney and Will Riley about sales enablement on Aligned, the podcast.

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Luke Allen: The alignment of marketing and sales is one that when you have that shift you can really bring both of those departments together focused on the same goal.

Sean Doyle: That was Luke Allen from occupational health dynamics. He's the SVP of Sales and today our guest on Aligned. Aligned does the podcast for executives of middle market companies seeking to improve sales and marketing ROI. I'm Sean Doyle your host for today's episode. Let's get to our conversation with Luke.

Luke Allen: Thanks Sean. Glad to be here. Looking forward to our time.

Sean Doyle: Yeah, been looking forward to this too. I was reminded a little while ago that we began this conversation at a coffee shop. And we had some ideas about what works and what doesn't work in marketing and sales and specifically though we ended up talking about late stage sales and marketing efforts. Well really you from your point of view, sales, and me from my point of view. So if I recall you said I was the Boomer and you're the millennial.

Luke Allen: Right. Right.

The baby boomer generation a two decade explosion of children born in the years following World War 2.

Luke Allen: We have an interesting dynamic don't we, so.. Marketing and Sales and then Boomer and millennial.

The millennial generation is generally agreed to include people born in the early 1980s through the early 2000s.

Sean Doyle: So I think you're really saying I’m old.

Luke Allen: Yeah.

Sean Doyle: Well that's nice.

Luke Allen: I've got gray coming in to so I can't say much.

Sean Doyle: Even you millennials get old? I love it.

Luke Allen: That's the rumor.

Sean Doyle: Let's talk about late stage. What do you call a late stage prospect. How do you define that?

Luke Allen: Yeah, for us late stage prospect really fits in anywhere where we think a decision is coming on a purchase. So for us if they fall into you know they've seen either a presentation or they've received some information and we have them in our pipeline to make a decision on closing out, whether it's with us or a competitor. And we treat those in different ways. You know, through marketing efforts but also through direct sales efforts all based on where they are in that process.

Sean Doyle: Well let's talk about who the “us” is. So, today we're with Luke Allen who's the SVP of Sales at OHD. What's OHD do?

Luke Allen: Yeah, so OHD we're a market leader in global respiratory protection. So we have..

Sean Doyle: What's that mean?

Luke Allen: Yeah, well we do we have different technologies for mask testing or respiratory protection testing for everyone that's from people in the workplace all the way to fire departments to law enforcement agencies around the world. Another department are defense groups. So we're kind of in a niche industry and have a technical background to our business. So we love we love what we do and try to protect people around the world.

Sean Doyle: So if I get this right, if I'm a fireman and I'm going into a burning building, it's really important that my mask fits. So I'm breathing oxygen, not smoke.

Luke Allen: Yeah, for you and the people that you're trying to save, right?

Sean Doyle: Yeah sure.

Luke Allen: So if you're in the house you're helping the firemen can do his job properly. Or her job properly.

Sean Doyle: So you sell a protocol that teaches or tests and make sure that masks fit.

Luke Allen: Yeah, absolutely. We test the mask themselves to make sure they're working properly and then also that the person knows how to put it on properly.

Sean Doyle: Yeah, that’s brilliant. So gosh, warfare, military, fire, police. I guess manufacturing.

Luke Allen: Yeah, chemical, you know oil and gas. Anywhere where there's respiratory threats that's where we play.

Sean Doyle: That's brilliant. And yeah, I love Niche. As a marketer, I love it. Anybody who's niche. I bet you could bore all of us with the details of how masks fit perfectly or dont.

Luke Allen: Yeah, and that's something we learned really with from you a number of years ago with really embracing the niche and embracing the technical things that people are gonna want to know about and building that into marketing and sales. So that's something we really have believed in more firmly as we've seen it work. So yeah, it's great. It's great to be in a technical niche market, no doubt.

Sean Doyle: So in full disclosure you and I do work together.

Luke Allen: Yeah, yeah.

Sean Doyle: Yeah, I mean I don't think it's wrong.

Luke Allen: Right, yeah. Less and less these days.You know, you're busy and I'm busy doing other things, but yeah, we kicked this thing off.

Sean Doyle: You’re gonna fire me during a podcast? Is that what you’re saying?

Luke Allen: No, no. But yeah it's it's been good and I think we'll we're talking about today we know works and it has a lot of value.

Sean Doyle: Luke I know you moved up from inside sales into regional sales manager, National Sales Manager, SVP of Sales, but not only in America. Now you're pushing into the European theater, maybe Asia, South America, international companies. Any sales person looking at your career would go “Wow.” That's that's the career I want to have. And on top of that, you're a nice guy.

Luke Allen: Thank you.

Sean Doyle: So that's that's neat. You've got a great family, a young family. And you’ve accomplished a lot in your career. When we were having coffee and we talked about these late stage sales, one thing that came up that you just started to share and that was how do you identify late stage. Are there other measurements? Are there protocols? Are there triggers? Do you have a process that you teach? How does that work.

Luke Allen: Yeah, so some of it's just, you know, Sales 101 with establishing when someone's timeline is and that can be done whether it's through marketing and looking at what they're reading, what they're downloading or giving you information to have access to. So if it's an ROI document, things like that. I mean, those are clear late stage decisions. They're not really learning about a new technology. They're looking at cost benefit analysis, things like that. And then we marry that with you know regional sales managers or distribution to look at budgets and timelines and these things. So that's how we begin to bring people into what we call our our pipeline to look at our 90 day pipeline, which is really late stage. So someone that's going to make a purchasing decision within that time within 90 days.

Sean Doyle: So you ask a time decision maker a question in your process.

Luke Allen: Absolutely yeah. And for us it's critical because we can't measure our business if we don't have time windows, you know. And our sales cycles longer. It could be 12 months, 18 months. And you know there's outliers there like any business obviously, but if you can if you can get a snapshot of your business in 90 days that at least helps you have a feel for what do we have in the pipeline for late stage.

Sean Doyle: Oh sure, and cash flow projections and a lot of simple but really critical things for business. So that's great. So you know, you acknowledge you've got this 12 to 18 month cycle but you don't do everything as soon as you get a lead. You're not throwing everything at them. You’re not throwing the sales people at them. You're being wise on when they get more involved which is brilliant. I see so many people that, businesses that, make decisions to throw every bit of ammunition they got as soon as they get a lead. They get excited. You've probably received some sales coaching on not getting over excited. Do you have a good story on that one? You were smiling.

Luke Allen: Well historically that's really been our culture was very heavy, aggressive, which I think is all positive. Right? You know, aggressive sales culture of you get someone that has any ounce of interest we're going to convert that person and we're going to pour every ounce of energy and that's, you know, in some of those context you could say well that makes sense. But what we found is that's really not the best way to to really mold initial interest at least. So one of the things that we do now is have a very specific marketing structure to where if someone shows a few signs we give them more content. We gate that content and we help them to go through those actions before we really unleash our salespeople on that lead. And so that strategy and structure we found helps customers navigate the sales process and we have visibility of it which is another key that we really didn't have before. Where our leads came from, how much content they've looked at. We had no clue. We just knew as soon as they show showed any signs of life, you know, we were on them. That was it. So that culture change has been just that, a change for us. But I think it's been a change for the better and the alignment of marketing and sales is one that when you have that shift you can really bring both of those departments together, focused on the same goal.

Sean Doyle: We have, in our science, we call it Cognitive Marketing and it's based on the transtheoretical theorem of behavioral change. If you want to get to bed early and go out fast, that's some good stuff.

Sean Doyle: One thing it teaches though, the behavioral science teaches, is that when you're preparing to make changes in your life you're always going to do it with in six months of a decision. So when you have a long sales cycle people think well that that conflicts with that science but it doesn't because in sales you might have somebody on your roster, somebody might have indicated interest, but a contract is not going to expire for a year, two years, three years. Or there's just not a need and maybe a large capex isn't needed at the time so you're not going to rush into a decision. You might sit at a marketing stage, a contemplating thinking stage, when somebody moves into that active step of buying in that preparation time, that's when you start seeing multiple decision makers showing up. So I might be responsible for a purchase but I'm not going to involve my SVP, my president, my CEO, my CFO until it's getting pretty close. Do you have any story or can you see that or am I just in this stuff?

Luke Allen: Well no. I think every good salesperson has the horror stories of of not identifying the different decision makers in a process because that will kill you. Not every time, but it's a threat. And most good salespeople try to identify those different decision makers, and as you said, they might not show up in season one or two in the process but best believe in a legitimate business deal, they will appear in one of those pieces and forsure by action stage. Whatever you guys referred to, assure you know for us that final decision period of action stage is going to be where you see more of the stakeholders show up, whether it's a financial person or someone that's over purchasing or whether it's someone in a vice president role or whatever your business is. So that's a key, key piece of sales and marketing is the having the content available for these people that you might not know who they are to have access to download these pieces of content or learn about your product without you knowing who they are. But yes, some of the horror stories are you think you're going to get a deal and then you find out later that well so-and-so decided that we're going to go a different direction and we never met that person.

Sean Doyle: You've done all your best stuff. You did your best pitch your best consultative sales, and there was just one person who wasn't involved. Yeah I felt that pain.

Luke Allen: Yeah exactly yeah. Every person in sales of any sort says probably felt that pain

Sean Doyle: I think that behavioral science is supported by that six month trigger, so we see or recommend when there's multiple decision makers involved in a buy, until you know who all the decision makers are and until they are all involved, that's the key, they're physically spending time. So again, I’m gonna go back to this leverage of my personal respect or my equity in a company right. I might have a salesperson and a meet with a sales person but it's only when I bring the boss in to meet with you. Now I'm leveraging myself my personal reputation. Well if I'd brought my boss in to hear a pitch for something we're not going to buy for a year and a half, I'm getting in trouble right. Not the sales guy. Yes it's me. So it's a great insider tip to start seeing when are your prospects bringing in their peers, maybe even their higher.

Luke Allen: Yeah. One thing I'll say to that to that I've found is the buying signal or needs, if you will, of these different levels of people within an organization could be different. And another mistake that salespeople will make or even marketing is they think that what your interest or need or your benefit of this solution is the same as the person that's bringing in the room and that is another big mistake. Great sales and marketing has to help identify that for each decision maker because it will be different. And you'll also find that people that are, and this is probably true in any organization, the higher up you are in an organizational chart with a lot of decisions that you're brought in on, you might not have as much interest or excitement about that. So you've got to really find what that person benefit would be for them if they're part of the decision and that's something again that you can miss if you're not looking for those signs or really building your marketing and your pitch. It can bite you.

Sean Doyle: So this is really, this is so crucial. We've been talking about sales and insights to sales so if you're an executive listening to this dialogue or you're a marketer listen to this dialogue, the question is, well the promise of this podcast was about marketing and sales and how do they work together. So it's so natural for a salesperson to talk about sales and it's so natural for a marketer to think their job is done once that lead is over to sales.

Luke Allen: Right.

Sean Doyle: So they've I've nurtured them for you for these 12 to 18 months. Hey there's some triggers, we're seeing those triggers, I've thrown the lead over. You've put your best sales guy on it. Individual, your sales individual. And now we're in this activegame and the marketers disappear.So I think there's two things that happen and I want to get your opinion on it. One, does the marketer disappear because they don't know what they're doing? They're unprepared? They're ill equipped? Or two, is sales stiff arming marketing because they don't want marketing to mess up their deal? Or both.

Luke Allen: Or option 3. I mean, maybe I'll pose to you, you know , my opinion would be there might be some gray area there. So it's not so much maybe will marketing mess it up or to sales want to stiff arm, but are they aligned? Do they know what role they each play in that part of the process and I think that's a weird baton pass because you have two groups of people that might be really talented at their craft. You know, marketing and sales, and so if you can find a way as an executive and if you're listening to this podcast and you're in an executive role and you're over sales and marketing, as I am currently, really one of the big executive questions is how do I get marketing and sales to be together and have messaging from the very front end all the way through the close. And if you can achieve that you're going to grow sales and you're gonna grow profit because you're going to execute more deals at higher profit margins. So I would say that the big thing is the grey area in the middle is how do you make sure that marketing is connected to that lead through the whole place. They see the victory of the closed deal, and the salesperson needs to understand the work that went into the strategy and the development of those leads to get to them. And I think salespeople are normally very short sighted and in our business where we're a very quick killer type deals. We're always looking for new deals, new deals, so they might not have the perspective of what went in to develop that lead. The merchants and the content and the workflows that I'm aware of now, that when I was in an inside sales role, in a regional role, I had no clue. So I would say it's probably a different answer in that you need that clarity and the alignment between the two departments.

Sean Doyle: Interesting. Yes so this could go so many ways. We could talk about attribution, you know, as a marketer it drives me crazy that you sales guys like last touch attribution because you roll us out. As a salesman, you're thinking well marketing attribution is crazy because look at all the work we did. We really closed the deal, and you do. But anyway, that's not that's not for today. But I think it would be interesting to talk through. And anybody who's a fan of sales also saw something when I asked you two questions. I was doing an alternative close on you. And you as a trained sales killer..

Luke Allen: I pivoted.

Sean Doyle: You did. Killing me.

Luke Allen: Yeah that's my that's my nature.

Sean Doyle: Okay. Now that we've thrown a third ball of wax and to juggle let's talk about how that grey area could be, we'll go down your path, that's what a good salesman do, right?

Sean Doyle: So going down that path, we'll call it an early late stage prospect. So we were talking to sales, they've been through that marketing attribution model. They've hit the scores that say it's time to go to sales. So sales is meeting people and learning people and they're listening. They should be listening. They should be provided a lot of business intelligence by marketing and we think, well I think, my philosophy is that there's three different aspects of the sale that marketing can contribute to to support and help the sales people. So the buyers looking for and can only move forward if they're emotionally excited about what's going on, their interested in that. Rationally, we call it rational arousal, like that's a neat rationale. That's great. And those are fairly marketing obvious, right? Let's get you excited rational and emotionally. A quick test when we audit people's sales and marketing efforts is we look for that because often, for example, if you're in manufacturing we tend to lean way on the rational side and you say emotion has no bearing. But you read studies that say even B2B decision making is emotional. So it's most often found that you're missing the emotion. If you're going to have maybe more of a retail setting, like banking, it tends to be all emotional. Like you could retire and live in a sailboat.

Luke Allen: Yeah, right.

Sean Doyle: There's no rationality to that, at all. But there's this third tool that is effective and I think very few agencies work on it. And this is what I would like to focus on and that is this commitment stage. So how can marketing provide tools to create private and then public commitment. So I want to dive into that. It's obvious what marketing can do to create emotional arousal and the salespeople should use those rational arousal salespeople should use those. But what do you do with his private, then public, commitment. We've seen over the years the most effective sales people are making one to one relationships, consultative relationships, call it what you want.

Luke Allen: Absolutely.

Sean Doyle: But I've got to get you to make a commitment to me and I'll make a commitment in turn to you and it's an exchange relationship right we're giving a nod to the cash that we want to change later. Cash for services. Cash for goods. So what effective ways have you seen salespeople create private and then public commitment and let me define that shift to public. You know, if I was meeting with you Luke, I'll do the ROI statements for you we'll do some initial consulting work we'll give you a study and I'll pay for that if you'll bring in all the decision makers to the meeting to share the findings. Would you be willing to do that? That's a private commitment that you could make to me. You're at no risk right. Your boss doesn't know if I'm a total goofball right. You can just get rid of me quietly right. Shovel me under the carpet. But if it works then, what I want is to get infront of all the decision makers. Have you seen good models for that private and public commitment? Have you seen agencies provide that? Have you seen it? What advice do you have around that?

Luke Allen: Yeah, from a sales standpoint, I think in today's age especially, and I'm putting my millennial hat on now, but you know, we're in a time in our world where relationships have selling-wise have gone down and I think that makes it even more unique.You know, I was reading some articles about how handwritten letters are even more appealing to people now because they're so rare.

Sean Doyle: How could you text a handwritten letter?

Luke Allen: Yeah, exactly. And I'm still trying to figure that out which, you know, I wish Harvard Business Review would give us an update on that. But yeah, so things like that but I think relational selling is a similar type line where you have people that if you can find ways to get commitment in a personal type way it really goes even further in today's world because it's so much more rare in our world where you can order this and click that and get it here and your price shopping or what not.So in our business some of the ways that we do that are we hire technical salespeople but that already have relational skills to to go in and build relationships with end users and to also find what those drivers are of what they really need. So rather than just selling a product, we're looking for application. We're looking for how we're going to deliver on training. How we're gonna deliver on end user technical support and those things, I think, allow a buyer to easily give you their personal commitment and then make that commitment public and then even goes into a further stage which is referrals, which are very important to us. And the only way you really get to the referral stage is you have to build the relationship stage. Even if a customer buys a product from you to help their personal needs, the referral stage is when they extend that trust and that personal relationship or even commitment out. And I think the only way you achieve that is through clear relationships of understanding their need, their application, and really understanding that and then executing on what you promised and what you will do.

Sean Doyle: Go back to referrals for a second. So in my head I have two ideas of what referrals could be. That would be marketing design, deep case studies. That could be testimonials are a dime a dozen. I think it's a big error in most of marketing to create these long in-depth case studies that are presented to early stage prospects. It's not an early stage prospect needs, right. But at this point I love telling our clients to build some deep case studies that give really insight that is beyond what anybody can ever hear. Hearing that third party, that customer, that person who made the decision that's a referral to me. I also would say if I'm looking for references, like can I call a couple of your customers, we always recommend you push that back to this stage because if you ask for it too soon you're really you're wasting your best customers time right. And so we withhold them. We'd like to say we'd be glad to do that but let's first get through this consultative step. Let's make sure this is a fit. Then we'll be glad to open those doors up, so when you say referral what are you talking about?

Luke Allen: Yeah. When I say referral we lean and focus heavily on on user referrals for new leads and new opportunities. We have customers all the time that will say you know who are the agencies that are using your technology. Can we speak to someone and like you said, we we try to protect those customers because that can be overwhelming. When I mentioned referrals really for us at the end of the buying cycle and you've built the relationships, you've gotten the personal commitment, you've closed the deal, however you want to refer to it, those people when you've done that well and you've done that the right way, they will be your best advocate to refer you to other people in their industry. Other people within their company. Other locations. Other people within their city. It's crazy for us. We do such a good job of building relationships we'll have a fire department say, hey do you do you know the chemical company down the road? You need to call on them and I don't know anyone there but they do they have a ton of masks and all of that comes out of they don't have to do that. They do that because we’ve done the personal commitment and we built this relationship. They could have just bought our product and it benefited their needs and it check the box and they're good to go. But when you've done this cycle the right way, now you've built an advocate and a real, I don't really like the word cheerleader I've seen that some of the marketing books lately, but in a sense you've built a person that's going to advocate for your technology. And so when I say referrals, we simply say, hey Sean do you know anyone else in the area within your company that would benefit from this technology? And we get so many qualified leads from that. It's really, it's huge for us.

Sean Doyle: So when you say that sentence I think about is is the idea of a young financial planner who's called me when I was 20 and he was 20 and then, you know, hey you know give me 10 names your best friends.

Sean Doyle: I was like oh, I just cringed. But this is somebody whose body and they get it. They love your product. Yeah it's interesting. Yeah I see our producer waving his hands desperately getting us to shut up, which is hard to do with the two of us.

Luke Allen: Right. Exactly.

Sean Doyle: So maybe we should take a break. Do you have time we could maybe get back together?

Luke Allen: Absolutely.

Sean Doyle: Do another late right before the deal. Right before the cash exchanges. And I'd love to get your insights absolutely on what that might look like.

Luke Allen: Yeah, I would love to.

Sean Doyle: OK good. Thanks for your time today.

Luke Allen: Yeah. Thank you Sean. Enjoyed it.

Sean Doyle: So the conversation continued and it was really interesting. Luke had some great ideas and some good insights on closing those late stage sales deals. So come on and checkout the next episode of Align as we continue our conversation with Luke.

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