← Making It with Jon Davids
Making It with Jon Davids
233 - Don't Make This BRUTAL Selling Mistake | Carolyn Sarnoff, billion dollar CMO
00:12:28
Loading summary
Transcript14 lines
- [00:00]
A
This clip of Making it with Jon Davids features John talking to Carolyn Sarnoff, chief marketing officer at Pattern.
- [00:10]
I think you hit on a really important point, and there's a rookie mistake. Unfortunately, it's not a rookie mistake. A lot of very experienced people also make this mistake is where they start with the product, where they should always be starting with the problem. The instinct is always to say, oh, you know, here's the thing I sell, or here's the way I can help you. Yeah, but you haven't outlined the pain yet. And as you said, starting with something as simple as, hey, is anyone else feeling this? Anyone else feeling like we can't get our products in on time? Or anyone else realizing that, you know, ad costs are soaring and we need to find better ways to get in front of our customers? And when you start with that, you get attention and then you can go into the solution, but if you reverse it, you're never going to get anyone to listen to you.
- [00:49]
B
That's exactly right. You have to build some credibility. It's like, why should you believe you are so busy and you get so many different folks reaching out and trying to get you to use their product or their solution. And so it's like you kind of have to earn. You have to earn the right for them to listen to you. And it's, it's showing that you understand and then building some credibility.
- [01:08]
A
Are you guys. I'm guessing it's. It's sort of a longer sales cycle that people are coming on board and using Pattern. Are people. Are you thinking about how to speak to them in different ways at different points in the purchase cycle? Or is there a certain point at which, hey, they know who we are now. It's the job of my sales team to figure this out. Or are you actually trying to nurture and educate and bring them down that funnel the entire time?
- [01:30]
B
Oh, my gosh, no, for sure. We are trying to be, you know, we have a, A, a motto. And this is across our sales and marketing teams. And that's to be what we call KHP squared. And that's knowledgeable, helpful, present and personalized. And so that means that we are showing up, you know, in the right places at the right times in a way that, you know, isn't overly salesy. It just, it feels like, hey, look, like we, whether you actually want to work with us or not, like, we are here to help, we want to engage with you. And so it's actually really, really fun to think about that full kind of journey that a customer might take with us and how do we engage them in different ways. And so obviously at the very top of the funnel, that is through often digital ads or emails or invitations to webinars. And it's really about, hey, it's about what we talked earlier. Like, hey, is anybody else seeing this? Here's kind of our take and here's how. Here are some important things that you might want to be thinking about as we get through the funnel. You know, we do a lot in terms of live events, and so we love that community building and so bringing folks together. And so sometimes that's us going out, you know, doing a field event, going into a city where we know we have a number of kind of prospects, sometimes that is bringing folks here to Utah and having them meet with a number of our executives. But all across that funnel, our intent is very much to just like, have some really interesting conversations we have. You know, I think as with any company and any marketing team, you talk to far more folks than you end up actually selling to or that you end up actually working with. But we love that journey, right? Like, we learned so much, you know, talking to people that we never end up working with.
- [03:15]
A
And there's also a long tail effect. People that you talk to today might become customers in two or three years from now. So the, the reason as companies grow, their sales pick up and their momentum picks up is because their fulfilling deals with people they started talking to two and a half years ago.
- [03:30]
B
Exactly, yes. One interesting thing that I have found in my time here is, you know, particularly as we think about being present throughout that sales cycle, which to your point, can be very long. You know, it can be months sometimes, to your point, it can be years. Cause someone comes back around and things have changed and just the timing is right to partner. As you think about having all those different touch points across channels, across kind of points in the funnel, one thing that I think is super important to say, okay, are we showing up really, really consistently across all of those touch points? And so when I joined Pattern, it actually seemed super clear to me, like who we are, right? We are, we're E commerce experts, we are knowledgeable, we are friendly, we're approachable, we're pretty casual, we're super data driven, a little bit nerdy. And so I think we were very much showing up that way in person. And so like I said, we have a very successful events program and we would have folks come and be like, oh my gosh, you guys are so great. And this was such a great conversation. And, you know, but our digital engagement was actually quite low. And so, you know, folks were coming to our website and they weren't staying for long or they were only, you know, they were landing on a page but not kind of navigating across the site. And that was really a trigger to kind of say, what's going on here? Why are we getting such great engagement when we can get people in person? And we were spending a ton of money, you know, on creating these compelling experiences just to get people to show up, like, more so for the. They would, like, show up for the experience and then stay for the conversation. And it was like, oh, I'm kind of pleasantly surprised that this was actually worth my time. And I think in going back and looking at some of our digital assets, it was like, you know, this actually isn't consistent with who we feel like we are and how we show up in person. If you looked at our website, it was a much different tone. You know, it talked about being premiere and, you know, it was just actually like a much more kind of like elitist tone, if you will. And that's not at all who we are. And so over the last year or so, we've done this pretty big, like, digital transformation in terms of how do we align our digital strategy with, like, who we truly feel like we are and what our real brand essence is. So I don't know. So this is a very long winded way of making that point. But when you want to be present throughout that journey, it's like, how do you also audit for showing up consistently when you have different folks who are responsible for different elements of those activities and different points in the funnel?
- [05:58]
A
This episode is brought to you by my Playbook social media selling machine, available right now@johndavids.com playbook. Let's be real. You don't want likes. You want sales. You want to know that customers are going to show up every day from the content you're already posting. This Playbook shows you how that's done, how to turn social posts into cash flow, and how to scale in a way that's simple, repeatable, and on brand. Grab it free right now at johndavids.com playbook. That's johndavids.combookbook.
- [06:31]
I see this actually more often than you think. So at influicity, we have a lot of big clients and I was just thinking the other week I was talking to one of our clients in the finance space. So it's a big sort of a hedge fund or investment type firm. And the funny thing is in their events, and they do a lot of speaking events and a lot of seminars. They're sort of a very jovial group and they're, you know, they're funny and they make jokes. And when you're with them in person, this, you know, the company that the culture is really sort of. That's the tone. And then you look at the content they're putting out on LinkedIn and it's like you're in a, you know, academic boring. And I said. And I noticed the disconnect and I was talking to the CMO and I said, why is it that when I go to your events, I get this experience, but when I go to your LinkedIn, I feel like it's a whole different group of people who's making this content and why isn't it these people who seem to be, you know, getting all the business and it's that disconnect because oftentimes it's just. It's different folks that are managing these channels. The channels maybe were created at different times. We started LinkedIn nine years ago. We started events three years ago. And, you know, we just have this legacy. And I think a lot of companies would. Would do a service to themselves to look at all their different channels and just make sure it's like the same person or the same tone, at least across all channels. You don't need to be this guy here and that guy there, and it's like two different people.
- [07:49]
B
Yes. I, like, just could not. I mean, you're preaching to the choir, but, like. Yes. And, you know, one of the things, I think that helps with that, and this sounds so obvious, so at risk of kind of stating the obvious, just to have brand guidelines for your voice and tone, we did not have that. And so, again, like, there was something that we were doing organically that was just coming through our people versus, like, what, you know, some of the marketing teams were doing. And so creating that, like, hey, here's actually who we are, and here's actually, like an articulation of that and making sure that everyone on the team has that. Because I think particularly as companies grow and scale and marketing teams get bigger, I don't know that it's possible to have one person really, you know, kind of overseeing every single thing. Obviously, that's your role. You know, I feel like that's my role as cmo. But how do you enable people to go, you know, act independently and autonomously, but also doing that in a way that feels very on brand and very.
- [08:43]
A
Consistent that's a big company tactic that I think a lot of, a lot of small companies should actually adopt. Even if you're a 5, 10 person marketing team, totally just taking a piece of paper and writing down, hey, here's who we are. If I was a person and this is, you know, why you use an avatar and you know, my core customer is Dave and he works at this company, writing it down and just having that document from day one. And it becomes so much easier when your team is 10, 20, 30 people. It's like, hey, guys, here's who we are. And maybe we're going to update this document periodically. But everybody sort of knows just writing it down is a great exercise. I want to ask you because you just, you mentioned twice events. So I'm curious. You've got a big marketing budget spread across a lot of different buckets and obviously big goals because your 2023 revenue was well over a billion dollars. How do you attribute sales or revenue or whatever that KPI is for you to, hey, events, digital, whatever. Do you think about it on that kind of a granular level or do you just say, hey, our marketing spend was this. Our revenue is this cool? We're doing fine.
- [09:47]
B
Obviously, like the very high level is our, you know, our marketing budget was this, Our revenue was that. But I think actually one of like the most fun things about being a marketer, it's also one of the hardest things because, you know, attribution is like notoriously hard. But one of the super things about marketing is that it can be so data driven and you can say, say, okay, I spent, you know, X dollars on events and I can then measure, okay, I can measure things like how much faster did a deal close for, you know, an account that attended an event versus one that didn't? Or out of all of the accounts that kind of made it to an active opportunity, how many of those, you know, attended an event? So you can start to do some statistical analysis on kind of positive influence and how much more likely is an event or how much more likely is an opportunity to created. How much faster does it close? How much more likely is it to close when they've attended one of our events? So that's one of the reasons I love being in marketing, is because you do get to kind of measure some of these things or to say, okay, I spent X dollars on a LinkedIn campaign and it drove, you know, x new Y new leads. And so was that actually. And then did those leads not just did it create kind of quantity of new leads, but did those leads turn into opportunities and ultimately convert? So you can kind of trace, okay, for leads that were generated through this particular channel, what happened to them? Right. Like, I think you're sort of doing yourself and your fiscal responsibility a disservice. If you're just saying, hey, I spent this and got, you know, X leads out of or Y revenue out of it, it's like, okay, what actually happened to those leads? Did they end up becoming, you know, customers? And so how effective are we? And I think that's really, really fun because then you can learn what's landing, what's totally not landing, or like, hey, that thing generated a ton of leads, but none of them panned out. And so it's like, maybe not on the face of it, it looks really good, but like, let's maybe not do that again.
- [11:42]
A
Thanks for listening. Get my best stuff to your inbox@johndavids.com Talk to you soon.
- [11:50]
This episode is brought to you by my Playbook website selling machine, available right now@johndavids.com playbook. Most companies want websites that look nice. But a lot of nice looking websites don't sell. What you really want is a website that grabs attention, builds trust, and turns visitors into buyers while you sleep. That's what this Playbook gives you. Based on 10 years of work we've done at Influicity, optimizing websites for 7, 8 and 9 figure brands. Download the Playbook now at johndavids.com playbook that's johndavids.com Playbook.