← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
Why Marketing wants Sales to love them (and why they’re just not into us).
00:23:52
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The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
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From advertising to software as a service to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising. Typical life span of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing.
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A
Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
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B
32 years it's been 32 years since Alec Baldwin uttered his famous line Coffee is for closers in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. In that famous scene, a team of salesmen blame poor leads provided by marketing for their underwhelming performance until their new leader urged them to stop complaining and take responsibility for their results. Despite the rise of the Internet, mobile phones, digital ads, and now AI, somehow we are still having the same argument over who gets the Glengarry leads. Nearly two thirds of sales and marketing say there's a lack of alignments between their department, according to Forrester's Sales and Marketing Alignment Survey. But hey, it's not all sales fault. Sales blames marketing for bad leads, marketing blames sales for poor follow up. Both teams suffer. So how can you finally bridge the costly gap? I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Kelly Hopping, the CMO of Demandbase. And today Kelly will reveal the secrets to creating sales and marketing alignment that drives measurable growth. Kelly, welcome to the Martech Podcast.
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C
Thanks, it's great to be here. Appreciate you having me.
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B
Very excited to have you on the show and excited to talk about a problem that is not necessarily something new. I mentioned in the open sales marketing. We seem to be at odds, and it's lasted for, I don't know, multiple decades. Is the concept of sales and marketing alignment actually achievable? Is that a thing where both teams can peacefully coexist a hundred percent?
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C
I've worked in companies where it's worked really well. I've worked in companies where it hasn't. And usually it Comes down to being super, super intentional about it. Whether it's around the metrics that you measure together, the way that you show each other respect in meetings, the way that you enable your to partner together, the way that you listen, I think all of those are solvable. So, for sure, isn't there some sort.
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B
Of healthy tension between the two organizations? It just seems like whenever there's that handshake and it seems like marketing is evaluated on one metric and dependent on sales or vice versa, there's gotta be some level of maybe healthy conflict that gets things moving.
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C
For sure. Yeah. I mean, I think that the healthy conflict has to be grounded in trust though. Right? It's hard to push back on somebody and a team and how they're performing. If you don't have an underlying trust that we're all in this game together and that we're all here to grow the business, that means that we should be able to push each other in the right way. I should be able to push my CRO and say, hey, we've got 74 completed meetings that were approved to move forward that your team is sitting on not converting to pipeline. I've got SDRs not getting paid on that pipeline because your guys are not managing their salesforce instances. Like, that's something, for instance. One of our things is we have for our pipeline, we have a certain percentage expected to be worked by the SDRs who in our case report into marketing. And then we have a certain percentage of the pipeline expected to be created by sales. And there are times when the SDRs are killing their results and sales isn't as much. There's other times when sales is killing IT and the SDRs are failing. We need to have a relationship so I can be like, hey, we're the guy doing our job. I need your team to be the one doing theirs as well. Or vice versa. Hey, we are struggling to drive expansion pipeline, for example. We need help. What? How can we better partner? How do we do daily scrums? How do we do something? But it's all because we're aligned to pipeline. What they don't care about is if we start talking about leads, if we start talking about responses, start talking about engagement, they're kind of like, wa. Wa. They have zero interest in that. But if I can say, I want to get you qualified pipeline and they have to physically accept it. Right? The way systems work, we can create the lead, we can create the meeting, we can create the confirmation that it was a completed meeting. But sales has to be the one that Grabs it and converts it over to pipeline and actually calls it. My team only is motivated by pipeline. The rest of the stuff is just leading indicators for troubleshooting. So if I can create pipeline, that's what they need. They need enough coverage of that to hit their number. So we all have a vested interest in pipe. At the end of the day, growing pipeline is the biggest thing we have. For them to hit their bookings number, for me to hit my targets, for our SDRs to get paid, for our sellers to get paid. So if we're not doing that, then we have a problem. And so aligning on that one metric is the biggest driver of all.
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B
If I'm reading back what you're saying, there's an alignment on metrics and making sure that the marketing metric is a comfortable handoff to sales. We are trying to drive pipeline. You're responsible for taking pipeline and converting it. We're looking at the same metric that is being evaluated in the handshake. You're also sort of inferring that there's a camaraderie team, there's a interpersonal conversation that has to happen between teams that is part of the underlying problem. Tell me a little bit more about that.
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C
So one, I think leadership wise is super important. I can't expect my demand gen or performance marketing team and my SDRs to work nicely with the sellers if I'm not working nicely with the CRO. So me and the CRO need to be in lockstep. It means that one, we truly respect each other and have good one on one conversation and respect for each other's roles, but that we also set the example in the way that we support each other to our teams. So if I'm in a meeting with my marketers and they say if sales would just, I'm like, ah, we're not going there. That sounds like you're pointing fingers. I don't have any interest in that. Tell me the situation and then we will figure out the solution. Like it's almost like a very intentional backup and say, hang on, we are not blaming. We are all one team. I've told my team from the beginning, I said your number one goal is to make sales love you and what that means. And that's my entire team. That's not just growth marketing. And I say that because I say sales needs a brand that they believe in, that they can tell a story about sales needs qualified pipeline, that they can actually go close. Sales needs easy messaging that they can defend. They need competitive differentiation. They need pricing and Packaging that's simple and makes sense. They need air cover in the market through comms or through PR or through new product releases. They need a land and expand strategy so they know what to sell to who and when they need those things. If we do all of those things, sales will love us. So if you keep in mind that your goal is to make sales life super easy, then we will have a good working relationship here.
- [07:23]
B
It seems like there's two concepts here. One is that sales is marketing's customer. You are trying to provide enough qualified pipeline and enough tools and resources for sales to close the deal. Your job is to make sales happy. Job. And I'm sure that there are marketers out there that are like, no, no, we get the customers and their job is to close them again. We're sort of in this headbutt and this tension between the two of who's responsible for what. And yes, there is a handshake between the two of them. And I have to bust your chops a little because one of the things you said was a marketing. It sounds like you're blaming sales, but literally the title of your book is yes, it's your fault.
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C
How do you read that? Is it, yes, it's your fault. Like the book telling me, hey, Kelly, settle yourself. It's your fault.
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B
I'm assuming that you wrote it, not like, yes, Kelly, it's your fault. As in, I'm saying you did it. But yes, it's your fault. As in looking internally, it's my fault. I made the mistake.
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C
It's a little bit of both. It's kind of cheeky all the way around. We actually, if you look at the COVID we actually cross out the why and it says, yes, it's our fault. It's us together. Okay, we need to solve this together. It's not one or the other.
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B
Well, let's talk a little bit about how to divide up the blame pie. Right. There's this handshake in the beginning. Marketing goes and gets the leads and builds the brand and gets somebody to the front door, hands them over to sales and whatever the results are are sort of out of our hand. How do you avoid that it's your fault mentality as opposed to, no, it's our fault. How do we get together and sort of build that camaraderie and that connective tissue from initial brand impact to customer closing and retention?
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C
One of the things that we do on a regular basis is so we have a funnel review every week. It has been rebranded. When I got here, it was called Pipeline Warriors. And you can imagine the mindset when you walk into a meeting called Pipeline Warriors. It sounds like you're there to fight. We changed it to Pipeline Builders and now we just have funnel review because it was kind of going all over. But essentially what it is is it's meant to be very factual. Where is the leakage? Where are we breaking down? What's happening? So our SQLs are up, but our conversion rate to pipe is down. Where's the quality on that? What does our band look like for these guys? How are we qualifying them as SQLs? Why aren't these meetings happening? Why is sales sitting on this? Why isn't marketing bringing more of these? And we literally pick apart and it's sales leadership, it's marketing leadership sitting there and RevOps, and it's literally a data conversation. And one thing that we've done here, and I don't know if I recommend it for every company, but it works really well. Here is our RevOps team, which is marketing ops. Plus sales ops sits together and they report into finance. They don't report to me or to the CRO. And part of that is because we didn't want it to be her data and his data, marketing data, sales data. We wanted it to be a neutral data body. And ops doesn't have skin in the game of like my boss or your boss. Instead, they sit neutral. So then when we say hey, and they'll look at it objectively and say, hey, this is what we're seeing is the gap. This is where things are falling apart. Hey, Kelly, it looks like you're hitting your marketing goals and your SDRs are converting on new business, but they're struggling on expansion. Hey, CRO, it looks like your expansion guys are doing great, but your new business guys are phoning it in. Okay, well, then let's figure out where we need to solve that. Is an enablement issue. Is it a training issue? Do we have the wrong profile in seat? So we work through those things and it's kept at a pretty high level in the meeting because we don't want it to be tit for tat. Kind of like you guys aren't doing their job. Who's the sales rep? What's he doing? Why are his numbers down? Like, we don't want it to be that. We want to be like, hey, we need to solve the macro issues here.
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B
That's a good organizational hack to take the infrastructure and reporting away from both of the organizations. So they are not, Hey, I brought my lawyer and he said this and your lawyer says that and they disagree and now we're in a fight. It's the judge said we need to do this.
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C
Exactly.
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B
Tell me more about your thought process for organizational structure to drive that alignment. You're pulling the operational piece out of sales and marketing and giving it some independence so it doesn't become territorial. I think you said SDR is under marketing. Like there's a couple different ways to structure a team. What do you think is the right way to drive maximum alignment?
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C
Yeah, we moved the SDRs to my team about a year ago and I've been a CMO four times. I'm probably 50, 50 on when I've had the SDRs versus when I haven't. And I love having them in marketing because there's such a continuation of pipegen. So they take any of our programming because what was happening when I first got here, I didn't have the SDRs. And so I was held accountable to Pipeline, but my influence stopped at lead. So I was like, hey guys, I need you to create Pipeline over there in sales. All I can do is drive leads and now I'm waiting for y' all to all do your jobs. And that was tough. And so I said, hey, if I'm going to be held accountable to Pipeline, then I need the guys who are creating Pipeline, who are actually catching all of this marketing activity and converting it. So we move the SDRs over. And that has worked out beautifully and they worked really, really closely. They're in kind of one to one pods with our AES and with our account directors and they partner with them and they meet one on one and say, okay, what accounts are you working? Like, what are you going after this week? Hey, I just had a good call with this. Can you have this meeting? And they kind of work one to one through that and that's been really helpful. But they also are connected to our programming, so they're building email cadences that are aligned to the marketing campaigns. They know that if we have a big event coming up, they're going to drive an outbound campaign tied to that. So it really helps that they're a part of marketing. So that's one. Like I said, we have Revops sitting independent. And then the way I have my demand gen team set up, I have global demand. And these people, they go after what I'll call our icp. So they're going after kind of everybody that fits in that sort of ICP definition. So they're going to be doing all of our digital paid media. They're going to do global campaigns, they're going to run a global webinars, they're going to do a lot of that kind of stuff. And then I have a field marketing team and field marketing is both kind of field in terms of regional and segment, but also abm. So they run all of our kind of one to one and one to few campaigns. And they're aligned to the salesforce, so they're aligned to new business and growth. They're aligned to east coast and west coast enterprise and mid market so that they map and they have a counterpart on the sales side. So when we said it's me and the CRO are aligned, our head of new business sales and our head of customer sales both aligned to my SVP of growth. And then I have field marketing managers at each of those other segments that align with each of the sales teams. So what that allows is them to sit in those staff meetings with the mid market new business team and say, okay, what do y' all have going? What accounts are you going after? These are the programs we're running. You can offer this finance executive CMO roundtable we're doing in Chicago this week. That's your offer. Here's the email cadence, here's whatever. And then the AES are able to run those programs. That's kind of how we have teams aligned. And then we just actually pulled out a separate customer marketing team that does nothing but customer. And that's everything from cross sell and upsell to advocacy and retention and speaking engagements and all that kind of stuff. I'm optimistic. It's a brand new thing. But it was because we were thinking we're kind of getting hybrid. We're sort of forcing marketing programming for new business that could work for customer, be interesting for customer, but not targeted for customer. We kind of said, you know, we need to go directly at existing customers with the content they need.
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B
I don't know why my head went this direction, but as you're talking about the alignment between sales and marketing, it seems like there's great balance, right? When I have a VP on the marketing side, I need a VP for them to talk to on the sales side. And I was thinking of like, okay, so your demand generation team is like the Air Force and they're flying over and carpet bombing and like clearing a path. And then your field marketing team is like the army that's rushing in and has strategic missions. But on the flip side, you need the Navy and the Marines to be able to make sure that there's places for the planes to land.
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C
Oh, I love this analogy.
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B
There you go.
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C
Keep it going. I like this.
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B
This is why podcast hosts get paid the big bucks. But it seems like there's not only an alignment, but there is this notion of takeoff and landing between these organizations on both sides side of the sales and marketing fence. And then I'll throw in that I was thinking, okay, well, how would I play this for the new customer team that you created? And I'm like, oh, that's like the National Guard. Somebody's got to protect the home turf.
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C
Okay, I'm going to do a whole military, but I can build a whole visual. That seems like a good slide for my next all hands. I like that.
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B
I'm sure we could just throw it into GPT and create a graphic. Hey, you've got your next internal presentation. Talk to me a little bit about the difference. When you're targeting. I know you're an ABM company to oversimplify what demand base is, and you obviously have some ABM practices. You're. Do we call you mid market?
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C
Yeah.
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B
So how do you think about the alignment between sales and marketing at the various stages of company growth when you're thinking startup, mid market and enterprise?
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C
That's a great question. It's kind of why I'm in a mid market company now. I don't think I was very good at it in an SMB company or a startup before I got here. I think there's this certain kind of one scrappiness that comes in sort of a smaller organization and the ways you have to go after marketing to me carries a much bigger responsibility in driving pipeline for smaller companies. So for instance, with the right budget, I can generate a hundred percent of pipeline if I'm going after SMBs, because I can target them individually. Mid market marketing's probably driving 60% of the target. And sales maybe is 65. Sales picking up the other 30. 35. And then for enterprise, like marketing can kind of get to maybe 25. And then sales has to really lean in. It's such a relationship play. It's a long game. It's a lot more than just now. Market influence is 90% across the board. We touch every deal that comes in. But I do think our responsibility varies based on the size of the company, which means you also need to vary your expectations with the team. So the way we set goals, for instance, like I have to drive a lot more pipeline for new business than sales does. Sales has to drive a lot more pipeline with existing customers because the account rep who's talking to the customer every single day. There's that trade off and that alignment means that we need to align on those numbers. That means within new business I might say, hey, that's an average of I need to drive 60% percent but that means I'm driving 80% for mid market and maybe only 30% for enterprise. But the average is that for all new business pipeline, I need to drive 60% of it. So I think there's some of that too. There's kind of an understanding and an acceptance of what we're all expected to do. Now the challenge on it is that if you don't just all together say we all own pipeline, what ends up happening is you can all of a sudden draw this line out that's like, well, we all own pipeline. We missed, but my guys hit their number. Did you guys hit yours? I don't think so because we missed some of that like can get really snarky. So part of it is kind of back in and be like no, no, no, it doesn't matter who hits the mix is only for troubleshooting. So we can say, hey, looks like our sales guys are missing or looks like our SDRs are missing. Let's go find out why. So we can help enable them to be successful. But at the end of the day we all just own pipeline.
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B
Yeah, it seems like that's the secret is that universal metric everybody is responsible for. But then again that leads to like well, we did our job again, this is not a problem. That's new. What I think some of the technology and the ways not only that we align our organizations but how we think about getting the alignment. Talk to me about the tech stack to right size and align your sales and marketing and how has that changed over time?
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C
I don't want to do the obvious shameless plug, but I will say that we run demand based on demand based. As you can imagine, demand based is account based go to market. So to me the epitome of account base is sales and marketing alignment. Right. It's making sure that the accounts are that marketing is targeting are the same accounts that are on sales target account list that they're going after. Right.
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B
Appropriate shameless plug and totally inbounds. Keep going.
- [18:55]
C
Okay, thank you. So when we run our one to one or one to few ABM plays, they are against our agreed upon target account list. Within sales and marketing same thing. We have a customer target account list that we also go after that drives some alignment. So demandbase is a big part of that. The other things that we plug into that. Obviously Demand base integrates with the rest of tech stack, the marketo and workato and tableau and outreach and kind of all the different things qualified, you name it, we connect them all together and then we kind of automate all the hooks that go through. But really the goal is for us to go after fresher line and accounts around one tech use Demand base to drive those when they get over to the sales side. Our SDRs tend to use demand base as their sort of catch. All the insights are coming in through demand base. They are outbounding through outreach. We have demand base in the iframe of outreach so they're able to see those insights but still work in their single platform. And then it goes over into sales and sales uses a combination of Gong and Clary and Salesforce to manage. But all of them are getting the demand based data inside that platform. So we're still running the same through line. And I think that's one. Again, not to do a shameless plug, but I think one of the big benefits of demand based is it connects all that data so you have one single stream of insights that are connected across your whole go to market ecosystem. And that's how we run it. And of course we weave AI through all of this. I got lots of tech stack of that I could talk about, but specific to your question, those are the ones.
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B
It wouldn't be a Martech podcast if we didn't bring up AI at some point in the conversation. Tell me how you're using AI in the sales and marketing alignment.
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C
I think the biggest area we're exploring AI is in the SDR universe. We now are sort of running four platforms. I don't know if this is like proprietary data, but we're running four platforms in our SDR team. We use Piper from Qualified. We use Qualified for web chat, but we use Piper specifically for meeting scheduling. When the STRs get in touch, then Piper sort of takes off and starts scheduling the meetings. We use Nooks as an autodialer which has really helped increase our volumes. Connect rate may be slightly down, but the absolute number of meetings coming out of it up quite a bit because of the volume increase. We use Clay in limited capacity, but mostly to augment our data to round out any data profiles to make it easier for our SDRs to outbound. And then we use Reggie, which is our new favorite.
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B
I'm new to Reggie. Who's Reggie?
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C
Reggie AI. Pretty small company, but pretty awesome. They basically do all follow ups so they automate and personalize a follow up to every single MQL that comes through the system, every single website visitor that comes through the system. When we lead list, we have an event and we load a lead list after of all the people that came by the booth, it automates emails straight out of that. So it's kind of the first one where it felt like we are supplementing the SDR's burdensome kind of heavy lift workload so much that we don't need to continue to grow. We can actually hold our SDRs to higher and higher goals because we're able to offload some of the monotony. So Reggie is my new favorite and I sit there and play with it all the time to kind of figure out what we can do, what we can automate, how many workloads we can add. And I think that's going to be the future of where this whole STR universe is going to be.
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B
It sounds like a dream. I think that the big thing I've learned through a lot of the AI orchestration and implementation is there is an integration cost you have to go through and you're essentially, instead of hiring more, you're bringing on AI, but you still have to put the same amount of work in to get the AI to have the context and to understand the boundaries and rules. And so it does require a fair amount of work to get that consistency that you need.
- [22:32]
C
Yeah, there's a little bit of a heavy lift at the beginning. What we kind of see ourselves as, because we run Demand base and the whole tech stack, we sort of see ourselves as customer zero for the integrated tech stack. So when we plug things into Demand Base or we're running Reggie, we integrate it with demand based data. We sort of work out all the kinks and then say, should we build this integration into our core platform that we sell to our customers? So we end up being sort of the flagship testing ground of all the things. And so far so good in terms of being able to have a pretty seamless integration with Regi and being able to turn it on. So excited to see how that can possibly go and get integrated into our platform as well.
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B
You have to taste the wine before you put it in the bottle.
- [23:12]
C
Yeah, exactly.
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B
And that wraps up this episode of the Martech podcast. Thanks to Kelly Hopping, CMO of Demandbase, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Kelly, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com you can visit her company's website, which is demandbase.com she's also the host of the Next Gen CMO podcast and the co author of the book yes, yes, it's your fault. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed next week. That's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
- [23:58]
C
Foreign.
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A
Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.