Thanks, I appreciate the opportunity to be with you all. I enjoyed - PDF document

Thanks, I appreciate the opportunity to be with you all. I enjoyed meeting several of you at last night’s reception. I’m the founder of a marketing agency and I’m also the host of The Marketing Book Podcast where each week I publish an interview with the author of a new marketing or sales book. I’ve been doing it for four and a half years, and last week I published episode 226. 1

The podcast has exceeded 1 million downloads, has listeners in 150 countries and has been named by LinkedIn as one of “10 Podcasts That Will Make You A Better Marketer,” by Forbes as one of “11 Podcasts That Will Keep You In The Know.” The one thing I didn’t realize when I started the podcast that I wish someone had warned me about, which of course I didn’t realize, is that you actually have to read each book before each interview. The biggest trade off of course is that has really cut into my scotch drinking. So Hailey is a listener of the podcast and a while back she contacted me about joining you here for this meeting. It was one of the strangest conversations I ever had. She said she was from PSNI and I was really confused. 2

I had two questions: 1) why would the Police Service of North Ireland want me to speak to them and 2) why are they meeting in Arizona? But it didn’t stop there. 3

When I asked her what she wanted me to talk about she said “S&M.” Again, I asked for clarification and what she meant was sales and marketing, specifically the benefit of closer alignment of the two. Hailey, you were very patient and I really appreciate that. 4

As a listener to The Marketing Book Podcast Hailey was aware that I have featured a lot of books about sales, in part because the most successful marketers have a deep understanding of sales and that’s even more important now than three years ago. She also knows that the alignment of sales and marketing is one of my favorite topics and in part drives my selection of which books to feature on the show. 5

So are there any baseball fans here? What teams? Does anyone know who these two players are? [Mike Trout and Bryce Harper] Why are they significant? [they just signed the highest baseball contracts in history, $426 million and $330 million. Trout stayed with the Angels and Harper went from the Nationals to the Phillies] Why did they get such big contracts? [because they can help teams win] Why is being part of a winning team important? 6

Whether you work in sales or marketing, we all want to be on a winning team. We all want our companies to enjoy faster growth and greater profitability. We all want to be the sales or marketing professional that every CEO wants to hire (or can’t afford to lose). What are the benefits to you of being on a winning business team? [job security, higher pay, recognition/esteem, promotions, ownership possibilities, desirability from other companies, etc] 7

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From a sales and marketing standpoint, the biggest problem is the changing way that buyers research and make their purchases. They want to do their own research and avoid interacting with the seller until as late as possible. And they don’t follow a linear, logical buying process. 9

When I was a kid and my dad wanted to buy a car, where was the first place he would go to get information? The car dealership. 10

Why did he have to go to the car dealership? This is what Daniel Pink in his book To Sell is Human refers to as “ information asymmetry .” The buyer wanted information and the seller had it. And the seller used that information as leverage to guide (or strong arm) the buyer toward a purchase. We are now in an era of Information Symmetry 11

Fast forward to a couple of years ago when my wife wanted to buy a car – where was the absolute last place she went to get information? Where do you suppose she got her information? Your customers are no different. 12

Many of you may have heard of the landmark study a few years back from CEB/Gartner about how in a B2B buying situation, the buyers are AT MINIMUM 57% through their purchase process before first reaching out to the seller. Forrester puts that number as high as 90%. It varies by industry and product, of course. 13

In the book Rise of the Revenue Marketer by Debbie Qaqish two charts are included which show the transformation of the typical buying process as it relates to interacting with a sales person. 14

Here’s what it looked like when my dad was buying a car. 15

And here’s what it looked like when my wife was buying a car. 16

Jamie Shanks, author of SPEAR Selling: The ultimate Account-Based Sales guide for the modern digital sales professional states that ““Your buyer has evolved more in the last ten years than in the previous hundred years.” 17

And with less control from the salesperson, the customer’s journey has become increasingly erratic. Here’s how Forrester has expressed it. 18

So here’s the cold hard truth. There is no longer a clear handoff from marketing to sales. Marketing and sales must now work together throughout the entire customer life cycle. In the past, marketing was able to hand off a lead to sales who would, in essence, take the buyer across the finish line. 19

From a sales funnel standpoint, marketing and sales could divide and conquer the buyer journey. That’s no longer the case for reasons I outlined earlier. 20

Now, rather than a clean handoff, companies are having to take a more customer- focused approach (not that there’s anything wrong with that). This flywheel approach never ends either, because most customers can make repeat purchases and/or can announce to the world about their experience with your company. 21

And as it relates to this new buyer journey, in the book Smash The Funnel: The Cyclonic Buyer Journey – A New Map for Sustainable, Repeatable, Predictable Revenue Generation the authors Eric Keiles and Mike Lieberman explain that the new buyer journey is a collection of eight cyclones, with the buyer going in and out of different cyclones, in different directions, while sometimes skipping entire cyclones. To better visualize your buyer’s journey, think of the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. 22

The eight cyclones are: 1. Pre-awareness 2. Awareness 3. Education 4. Consideration 5. Evaluation 6. Rationalization 7. Decision 8. Ongoing Delivery But – companies need to set the table in each cyclone for when their buyers do spin in and out of various cyclones. And for each cyclone, both sales and marketing have a role to play. 23

In this chart you can see the contrast from the earlier slide of marketing owning the top of the funnel and sales owning the bottom. Now it’s a mashup of activity for both teams that needs to be aligned around the customer. Is it worth it? Well, according to a study by SiriusDecision, companies that are able to better align their marketing and sales activities average 19% faster growth and 15% higher profits. 24

In many companies, divisions can exist between sales and marketing. For instance, sales people will complain about poor quality leads generated by marketing. Conversely, the marketing people will complain about Sales’ weak follow up, if at all, of the leads. Sales sometimes thinks of marketing as irrelevant party planners. While marketing can view sales as lazy and incompetent. In a CEB/Gartner survey, sales executives’ top terms for their marketing colleagues included “paper pushers,” “academic,” and perhaps worst of all, “irrelevant.” On the other hand, marketing executives called out their sales counterparts as “simple minded,” “cowboys,” and flat out “incompetent.” Strikingly, across several hundred sales and marketing responses, a full 87% were negative . 25

If you only read one book about aligning your company’s sales and marketing efforts, I recommend Aligned To Achieve: How To Unite Your Sales and Marketing Teams into a Single Force for Growth by Tracy Eiler and Andrea Austin. The co-authors were the head of marketing and sales respectively for a B2B software company. Both had worked at companies where sales and marketing were not aligned and at companies where sales and marketing were aligned. The book outlines the journey both took together (as head of marketing and sales, respectively) to successfully align their departments and the business growth and profitability that ensued. Throughout the book, the co-authors stated “ Sales can’t do it alone and marketing exists to make sales easier .” 26

One of the best analogies for the relationship between sales and marketing is in the book Shift: 19 Practical Business-Driven Ideas For An Executive In Charge of Marketing But Not Trained For The Task by Sean M. Doyle. 27

“To borrow a NASCAR analogy, the salesperson is the driver. The driver is only going to be as successful as the design of the car, the fuel, the mechanics, a study of the track, competition, tires, metallurgical design, hydration, quality components of parts and external tools bike tracks and refueling tanks, and even meteorological expertise– everything that goes into competitive racing. Marketers are the ones who assemble the team. Sales and marketing can't function without each other.” Welcome to Team Revenue 28