Transcript

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle and Pedal. Divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki and Jeff McKay.

Jason Mlicki:
So Jeff, Happy New Year.

Jeff McKay:
Happy New Year.

Jason Mlicki:
Welcome back. It’s great to be back making digital radio again. So, today we are going to talk about getting marketing and sales on the same page. So, getting alignment. And I guess I don’t even know why we need to talk about this. Can’t we just hire a chief revenue officer and then just make it go away? Isn’t it their job to do that. Isn’t it that simple?

Jeff McKay:
It is that simple. I guess there’s two schools of thought here. It’s that simple or it can’t be done. No in between.

Jason Mlicki:
Well, it’s the tale as old as time, right? The friction between sales and marketing that has existed for as long as sales and marketing has existed, I guess, right?

Jeff McKay:
Yeah. It’s like the Hatfields and McCoys. Nobody even knows why they don’t get along. They just don’t along.

Jason Mlicki:
They just don’t get along. Yeah.

Jason Mlicki:
I’m excited to dig into this with you because I know you’ve got good thinking on this and you’ve lived it firsthand, unlike me. I really want to jump into it. So actually, I know where we start. You were a CMO for many years. So, when you were trying to break down that barrier, where did you start?

Jeff McKay:
Oh, man. Well, before I was a CMO and even before I was a marketer, I was a sales guy. My career started in technology sales. I worked for Silicon valley company selling ERP systems in the auto parts industry. So, I bring some empathy, I guess, for the sales side into marketing. But after I left sales and got into operations, I have to say I did lose some of that sales empathy, and definitely once I got into to marketing because I came to appreciate how backward sales people actually are.

Jason Mlicki:
Well, actually I think it’s an important point you just raised though, which is the advice that every marketer is given when they come out of school as a marketer is, “Hey, you’ll get a sales job.” And most marketers resist it. They don’t want to do it, right? And I think some of this modern selling series that we’re close to wrapping up that we’ve been on for the last month and a half is about breaking down those preconceived notions of what selling is.

Jason Mlicki:
And when you come out of college and someone says, “Get a job in sales.” It sounds icky and it sounds like something I don’t want to do. I didn’t go to college to go pound on doors, is the perception of what you’re walking into. And I’ll even say in my own personal experience when I came out of college, I felt exactly that way.

Jason Mlicki:
And in hindsight, I really wish I had taken a sales job right out of college. It would’ve been the best thing that I could have done in a B2B environment, in the types of sales environments. Like DuPont. Geez. Working for Maria, that would’ve been amazing, right? How much would you have learned from that organization? So, I think you raise a really important point that if you’re a marketer and you’ve never really sold anything, you need to find an opportunity to sell something, to get a chance to feel what that is like. Even if it’s just shadowing, but something that gives you a sense of what’s going on as a salesperson, I think is really critical.

Jeff McKay:
I think you’re absolutely right. And my father gave me that advice. He was marketer and a CEO of a business and he said, “You have to go pound the sidewalks or nobody’s going to listen to you, and you do need to understand the sales perspective and what it means to waste time on bad leads or to clarify and develop an opportunity to be rejected and to have the pressure of a quota.”

Jeff McKay:
You need to have all those experiences to really develop empathy for the sales team. And sales is … I don’t want to overstate this, but it is the most important role in an organization because nothing happens until something gets sold. It’s just that simple.

Jeff McKay:
But you asked me a question, so let me answer it. When I became a CMO, how did I bridge this?

Jeff McKay:
I don’t even know where I heard this, but this was the thing that really transformed my perspective on sales and marketing and alignment. And it is this: That the disconnect or the issue between sales and marketing is not a problem to be solved. It’s never going to be solved. There’s always this dynamic tension that exists between those two functions and it needs to be managed. So, it’s not a problem to be solved. It’s a tension to be managed.

Jeff McKay:
And the best CMOs and the best chief sales officers understand that and they know what’s healthy tension and what’s dysfunctional tension. But if you don’t bring that perspective to the table, you’re going to be trying to solve a problem and it’s not solvable.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah. I think that’s a really healthy way to look at it, because I also think about, and we’ll get a little bit mushy here for a second, but you think about organizational dynamics and culture. And if you spend your time, if you’re the CMO or you’re the marketing lead or the sales, whatever your role is, and you’re spending your time fostering this culture and your team of finger pointing, “Well, they’re the problem, right? They’re the reason we can’t get this done.” Or, “They’re not listening.” Or, “They’re not selling the way we framed this point of view on the market.”

Jason Mlicki:
Well, that’s probably unhealthy because that’s not collaborative and that’s not driving the organization forward. And as you’ve said so many times, clients don’t care. To clients, it’s one thing. Marketing, sales, and delivery. It’s all one thing. It’s one firm and they don’t really care. So, you have to get out of that. So, I love that notion of managing the tension. So, I guess that means understand the tension and is it working to minimize the tension or is it just working to get the most out of it?

Jeff McKay:
I think it is to get the most out of it. That’s really a good way of saying it. I actually was going to say to maximize the tension, but that might be a little unhealthy. But it is to get the most out of the tension. And I think what makes that valuable, or the awareness of the tension, the self-awareness of the tension, is what makes it valuable. It’s like realizing you have some foible and say, “Oh, I own this foible.” And by owning it, it allows you to control it. And I think that tension’s the exact same way. So, get the most out of it without creating dysfunction that hurts the organization, the finger pointing and the us versus them that you just described.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah. You laid out three steps in our pre-talk, so I want you to walk through those. Because I think the way you frame this is that your objective is to manage the tension and here’s three steps on how you’re going to kind of work through that. So, let’s start at the beginning.

Jeff McKay:
So, I think the most important step, once you’ve realized it as an intention, is you have to bring these two teams together and they be brought together with a shared goal. And not some ethereal goal, but a very tangible goal. Drucker says the purpose of an organization is to get and keep a customer. Well, that’s the goal. Get and keep a customer. We can all share that because that’s what leads to revenue for the entire organization.

Jeff McKay:
So, what is the right KPI then? I think that’s something very different and where most people go wrong. I find that the best measure of a collaborative well managed tension between sales and marketing is a sales qualified lead. Most people say, well, no, it’s a marketing qualified lead. Maybe a gray area there, but the sales qualified lead, to me, says to marketing, “Yeah, you’re giving me leads that are of value to me that I can actually do something with.” And the effort and the work comes around, okay, what are the attributes of a sales qualified lead and to what degree can marketing drive to those so that we’re sending the best leads to sales and nurturing the ones that aren’t quite ready yet? And knowing the difference between the two and when you should hand one off and when you shouldn’t.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah. It’s interesting to me that you use that phrase, sales qualified lead, only because I had so many things going through my head when you said it. What I netted out, as you were talking and I was listening to you, was that I actually think that is probably the biggest point of tension is that often there’s just a disconnect between what sales really wants that qualified lead to look like and what marketing is confident they can deliver.

Jason Mlicki:
And it’s like there’s a gap between the two and then closing that gap is either really, really hard or maybe even not possible. And so it’s figuring out how to both agree on like what you really like to have and what you’re willing to accept and find some gray area in between where both parties can be happy. Our corporate attorney likes to say, when you’re negotiating a deal, he’s like your goal is basically to get a deal in both parties are slightly unsatisfied. Because if someone’s really happy, then someone’s really unhappy. Especially when you’ve got maybe a really competitive deal scenario,

Jeff McKay:
I think that’s a great analogy. It is. And that’s where the tension stems from. “He said, she said, I want, you want.” And nobody is ever completely pleased. And what makes it even more difficult is you could have some objective sales qualified lead criteria, meet it, and salesman one will love it and salesman two won’t because of salesman two strengths and weaknesses around … Or passion for given product or solution or whatever the case may be, they’re going to have reservations about that. Again, that’s why a tension exists. It’s why the next step is really important, I think in this process, you want to move to it?

Jason Mlicki:
Well, before we do it, I want to ask you a quick question because in the outline, you, you and I talked about, shared goals need to be quantitative and qualitative. So, I want you to talk about the qualitative side of that. Quantitative might be agreement on the definition of what a sales qualified lead looks like and how many and how frequently and all that stuff. And that’s totally great. And then maybe that ladders up to revenue, other things, but maybe it doesn’t. I don’t want to put those words in your mouth. What does the qualitative side of that look it?

Jeff McKay:
The qualitative side of that in my mind is the ideal client profile.

Jason Mlicki:
Okay.

Jeff McKay:
Agreeing on the demographic, and more importantly the psychographic, and why that’s so important in managing the tension and aligning sales and marketing is that marketing is nothing more than sales at scale. So, you’re not going to be effective at marketing unless you’ve clearly segmented your markets and you’re speaking directly to the needs of that market. You cannot be all things to all people.

Jeff McKay:
So, that’s why you have to make those strategic choices. Well, that cascades down into sales. When we look at sales metrics, sales want shorter revenue cycles, they want increase sales productivity, they want higher close rates, they want larger deals.

Jeff McKay:
Well, all that ideal client work is designed to enable that by selling to the same type of people under the same types of conditions with the same type of needs gives you scale and allows you to perform better around those KPIs. But if a salesperson keeps going off and trying to close whatever it can close, you’re reinventing the wheel all the time. So, the qualitative aspect is not an exercise in creating some kind of generic personas or something that just sits in a marketing plan. It’s designed to get alignment so that you can get scale in marketing and sales.

Jason Mlicki:
I really like that phrase. Marketing is sales at scale. That’s actually probably the best thing I’ve ever heard come out of your mouth. It’s this a great like snippet one liner. That should be the title of your book. Marketing is sales at scale.

Jeff McKay:
Oh, well I wish I could say I invented that, but I’m sure somebody much wiser than I pointed it out first.

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle and Pedal, divergent thoughts on growing your professional services firm. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki, principal of Rattleback, the marketing agency for professional services firms, and Jeff McKay, former CMO and founder of strategy consultancy Prudent Pedal. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by telling a friend and rating us on iTunes. Thank you. Now back to Jason and Jeff.

Jason Mlicki:
Okay. So, let’s move to step two then. So step one is about getting shared goals. What’s step two?

Jeff McKay:
So, step two to me is about where are you going to focus the energy of these two organizations? And generally they’re bifurcated along a continuum that leads to traditional marketing and sales problems, right? And in professional services and B2B firms, marketing likes to just wash their hands of all the sales and go manage brand umbrella and talk about values and culture and manage their pretty brand identity stuff.

Jeff McKay:
And sales wants marketing to either just give me leads or help me write up this proposal. When really, the real value and the synergy between those two is in between those. And looking for opportunities along the buyer’s cycle, the buyer’s journey, to reduce friction. Because if you find out why people aren’t buying and you prioritize those hurdles or friction and sales and marketing work together to eliminate it, then sales cycles speed up, close rates increase, and you developed a trust and relationship that Blair and Maria and Andy talked about in some of our earlier podcasts, and building relationship and trust by eliminating the friction in the buyer’s journey. And I don’t see many organizations thinking in those terms. But man, if you really want to build synergies between sales and marketing, that’s the way to do it.

Jason Mlicki:
You know what strikes me as interesting? And I don’t know that I have the answer here. But I’ve been reflecting on some of the things that we heard from Blair and notion of friction and I’m noticing that sometimes removing friction is slightly at odds with value based selling and value based pricing.

Jason Mlicki:
I would actually argue, I don’t think it’s about necessarily reducing friction, it’s about understanding that friction and managing against it. Because I’ve noticed I have a couple clients where their intentions are good. They’ve worked really hard to simplify the way they price and the way that they propose on work. And the way they do that actually does dramatically reduce friction in the buying process. The yield though, is that they’re not pricing their work at the highest value they’re creating and they’re be missing out a little bit on ancillary value they could be creating for clients.

Jason Mlicki:
I actually think it’s a really interesting dichotomy around … I don’t know if it should only be about reducing friction. I think it should be about understanding friction and figuring out what friction’s good, what friction’s bad, taking out the bad and keeping the good there.

Jeff McKay:
I wouldn’t disagree with that. I wouldn’t disagree with that at all. And I think our discussion with Joe Rice would support that. His whole model is in looking at the friction that exists in validation and consensus building, but there are many different types of friction and many different ways to solve them. And that’s unique to each company in each marketing function in each sales function. And that’s why you and I can’t give our listeners, “Well, here’s the answer,” or, “Here are the points of friction you should eliminate.” Well, you have to do that hard work of understanding.

Jason Mlicki:
It makes the point though, which is that your energy needs to be on understanding that friction. And as you just raised the point, my head always goes to the friction between the buyer and the seller. The friction that the buyer experience is trying to purchase your firm’s services, hire its expertise. But you just hit the nail on … As Joe points out, there’s friction all over the organization. There’s friction inside the client’s organizations. So, to your point of spending more time focusing on that, understanding that friction and how it works and what friction’s good and what friction’s bad, what friction you can take away, is a much better use of your time than helping out [crosstalk 00:17:53]

Jeff McKay:
RFPs and [crosstalk 00:17:54]

Jason Mlicki:
Not that those things are bad things to do. You need to do them, but I don’t know that they’re the most important thing.

Jeff McKay:
Well, they’re building blocks, right?

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah.

Jeff McKay:
You got to have some things in place before you go to these higher value, more specific types of issues. But most people already have that other stuff in place. And what they do instead of managing this tension is they go back and reinvent or recreate or rewrite the other stuff just to make work. And that’s a waste of time.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, it’s funny. I’ll share my own finger pointing for a second. I bumped into this a couple times with clients and it goes back to your step one. You can’t get the leader of the firm to agree on what their goals are. So, it’ll be like, “Well, we need more leads.”

Jason Mlicki:
“Well, how many leads do you need?”

Jason Mlicki:
“I don’t know. We just need more.”

Jason Mlicki:
“Well, what are good leads?”

Jason Mlicki:
“I don’t know. We just need more.”

Jason Mlicki:
“Well, what’s our revenue target?”

Jason Mlicki:
“I don’t know. We’re just actually trying to get to 10 million.”

Jason Mlicki:
“Oh, okay. How many deals do we need to get that?”

Jason Mlicki:
“I’m not sure.”

Jason Mlicki:
We bump into that a lot where it’s there’s just this fuzzy sense that they want more from marketing, but there’s not real clarity on what more is. I think, in the end, the reason I share this is I do think that that ends up putting marketing in these boxes where it’s like, “Well, let’s go crank out some more demand gen, because we need more leads because so and so says we need more leads.”

Jason Mlicki:
Do we really? Or not? Maybe we do, and I’m a big believer on … You got to get agreement on how many leads and what they look like, because if you don’t do that and if it’s just directionally more, then to your point, you’re just going to keep throwing more resources at demand gen, because what else are you going to do? Because that’s what you’ve been asked to do is deliver the maximum number of leads possible in human existence. So, okay. I’ll just ram out some more videos, crank up some more research or whatever.

Jeff McKay:
Yeah and then the quality of the leads go down and then you’re in a downward spiral.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah. So, I don’t know, I guess I’m circling back to your first step, which is you’ve got to get shared metrics and agreement on what your goals are here. I continue to be shocked at how frequently that’s not a thing.

Jason Mlicki:
Okay. So number three. Let’s jump to the third step. So, you got three steps here. So, first step is about getting shared goals. Second is spending more time on reducing or managing friction in the buying process and maybe a little bit less time on demand gen and RFPs and that kind of stuff. And so what’s step three? What’s the third thing you got to do to get alignment here?

Jeff McKay:
The third thing, and I don’t know if this is the hardest or the simplest thing to do, but you have to learn how to play a long game and a short game simultaneously. Because the salespeople all are going to be focused on hitting quota for the year and maybe even for a quarter and they want to close a deal quickly in order to get there. That is the nature of sales. You’re not going to change it. It may have a range based on your firm’s culture and intensity around sales and your sales process, your sales philosophy.

Jeff McKay:
But even with those things in place, salespeople are going to be more short-term thinking than marketers. Marketers are going to be thinking about the brand and the legacy of the firm and culture and all of those stewardship types of attributes that marketing should be driving.

Jeff McKay:
But the two are not mutually exclusive because multiple short terms make up the long term. It’s understanding when you make these short-term choices, what are the long-term implications? Both on the culture, the brand, but also the financial wellbeing. There is no absolute purity of sales pursuit and closing revenue. And we talked about that to some degree with Brian Cafarelli when we talked about good revenue and bad revenue. But this is about being attentive to that good revenue and bad revenue and thinking long term about the firm.

Jason Mlicki:
I really like this a lot, actually. I always have this sense that in a lot of firms, the long-term goal is a little bit underappreciated. There’s such a short-term focus on, “Well, we got to get these deals done this quarter, this year.” This is the revenue target for this year. And there’s maybe some fuzzy sense of a revenue target three or years out, but there’s no real clarity on what they want the firm to be known for, what issues they want to solve, what markets they want to own, that kind of thing. And I think it’s really important.

Jason Mlicki:
For years we ran EOS at Rattleback and I think one of the best things about EOS is that you establish a long-range goal, a big, hairy, audacious goal, a 10-year type thing, you establish a three-year thing, you establish a one-year thing, you establish a quarterly thing. And when you do it all together, it helps you see, well, like what we do this quarter affects whether or not we’re ever going to get to that 10-year vision or that three-year goal.

Jason Mlicki:
And I just think that there’s probably more of that that needs to happen inside sales and marketing units to recognize, to your point, well, if we’re trying to get here, every deal that we make along the way influences our ability to get there. If we do a bad deal, we are going to get off the path. That path will not lead us to that place and what we’re trying to get. And so that’s a really great way to look at it.

Jeff McKay:
And I think Jason, that’s where leadership is so important. Because it takes prudence to a discern-

Jason Mlicki:
Oh, wait-

Jeff McKay:
To discern-

Jason Mlicki:
Oh, wait, oh no, oh gosh. I’m in pain. Prudence again.

Jeff McKay:
That’s right. It’s that situational awareness.

Jason Mlicki:
[crosstalk 00:23:39] Please let me get to February before you make … I don’t want to be prudent. I want to be bold. I want to think big. I want to attack.

Jeff McKay:
Well, I think you, again, you don’t understand the word prudence. Prudence does not prevent you from being any of those things.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, I just like to give you a hard time.

Jeff McKay:
Anyway, prudence is important because you need to discern and it’s situational. So, that’s why leadership is so important in managing this tension.

Jason Mlicki:
All right. So, we are at wrap time. Now, before we wrap though, I’m going to put you on the spot. So, you laid out three steps to get more alignment, to get marketing and sales on the same page. You also laid out a mood, I don’t know how else to put it, but a feeling underlying all that. This notion of your goal is to get the most out of this tension, not to eliminate it. Not to say, “Here’s a problem here. We’ve got to fix it. We’re going to kumbaya. We’re going to solve it.”

Jason Mlicki:
It’s about understand the tension. Now anyway, what’s your one biggest piece of advice walking into 2022 for firm leaders? If this is a pressing challenge for them, that they’re saying, “Hey, we, we are just not on the same page here.” What’s the first thing they should do? Maybe even before these three steps, if there is something before.

Jeff McKay:
Yeah, great question. I think the thing that firm leaders do best and should do in this situation is set higher expectations. And by that, I mean demand more from your sales and marketing teams that actually deliver strategic impact for the firm and make life in the firm better. And recognizing this as a tension that needs to be managed is where it starts. But if there’s one thing, nothing changes till something changes. And that’s the managing partner and the practice leaders demanding something better of their teams.

Jason Mlicki:
I like that. All right, man. Good way to start off the new year. I’ll talk to you next week. We’ll try to get alignment between you and I for the next podcaster.

Jeff McKay:
Good to be on the horn with you, buddy.

Jason Mlicki:
See you.

Jeff McKay:
Bye.

Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to Rattle and Pedal, divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Find content related to this episode rattleandpedal.com. Rattle and Pedal is also available on iTunes and Stitcher.