For early stage businesses, marketing often reports to the founder or head of sales, and plays a subordinate role as a sales support function. This model can work during the forming phase of business growth – when sales is driving most engagement and is helping to further define the market fit. But eventually, to scale a brand and expand the business, marketing and sales must become peers within the leadership team – playing complimentary, but truly different roles.
Making the shift from sales-led to sales and marketing synchronized can be tricky. It’s truly a “make it or break it” moment for the future of your organization’s revenue health. How you make this transition – and continue to define sales and marketing roles and responsibilities – will either foster a climate of competition, or nurture a culture of collaboration.
Growing businesses can’t afford to allow unhealthy tension between sales and marketing. It’s ultimately not about who gets the credit for the lead, the deal, the revenue, or the profit. It’s about your business winning together by working together.
Key Takeaways
- Alignment and accountability don’t happen by accident, and they don’t happen on islands separated from each other.
- Fearless conversations and clear, shared accountability can build trust between marketing and sales teams.
- Leverage sales and marketing technology to understand the customer journey and make data-driven decisions.
- Communication is critically important in working together as a unified team.
- If you don’t have the right message, you’re just making your brand suck faster to more people.
Links & Resources Mentioned
- Sales Xceleration
- Empowering Success with EOS
- What is the Authentic Growth™ Marketing Maturity Matrix?
Full Webinar Transcription
Introduction and background
Jennifer Zick: All right, welcome. We’ve just opened up the doors to today’s Authentic Growth™ webinar and folks are starting to roll in. So I’m going to let everyone get settled for just a couple of moments while people are finding their way into the zoom link and landing here with us today. So welcome to those who are just arriving. This is the Authentic Growth webinar today, and I’m your host, Jennifer Zick.
We’re so glad you’re here with us. Just want you to check and see if you’re in the right place. If you’re expecting to talk about sales and marketing and learn about that, then welcome. If this is a topic you weren’t expecting, then just stick with us. Anyway, it’s going to be fun. So we’ll get started in just a moment. I’m just going to give everyone a chance to roll in. It looks like we’re getting a good critical mass of participants. All right, awesome. Well, we’ve got a whole lot of content to cover today, so we’re going to start on time. We’re going to end on time and fill it with a lot of fun.
But thank you to those of you joining us today. I’m Jennifer Zick, the founder and CEO of Authentic®. Delighted to be your host for today’s webinar, where we’re going to talk about sales and marketing and how to bring these roles together to create one unified revenue team. I’m so excited to be joined today by panelists from Authentic and from our partners at Sales Xceleration. And I’m going to, in a moment, pass the baton around this virtual room so every one of our panelists can say hello and introduce themselves. But first, I want to share with you just a little bit about this webinar series and what we hope to achieve and share with you today.
So the Authentic Growth webinar series has really been designed to cover a wide range of growth topics for growing businesses. Authentic is a fractional CMO firm, and we work with growing businesses all across the US and beyond to help them overcome random acts of marketing and confidently take the next right step in healthy growth. So the businesses that we primarily serve are growing founder-led, sales driven, growth oriented, entrepreneurial companies, usually between 5 million to 100 million in annual revenue. So as we talk about today’s topic, at the heart of what we’re thinking, contextually are those types of businesses.
But I also recognize that we have a lot of guests in the room today who are coming from different perspectives, either startup, small business, independent consulting agency, or large enterprise, wherever you’re coming from, to join us for today’s conversation. We hope that you’re going to come away with some nuggets that are going to inspire the role that you play in the revenue ecosystem. And we also want to offer up ourselves as resources to stay connected with you and to continue this conversation after the webinar.
So, but without any further ado, I’m super excited to introduce to you our panelists today. From Sales Xceleration, we have Maura Kautsky and Scott Schaefer. And from Authentic, we have my colleague Barb Bertsch. So I would love to give you each a moment to introduce yourselves.
The final thing I’ll say before handing over the mic is that Authentic is just delighted to have recently announced a strategic alliance with Sales Xceleration. And why we’re so excited about that is because Sales Xceleration is the leader in the space of fractional sales leadership and structure, and Authentic is leading in the space of fractional marketing leadership. And all of our clients really need to get strong in both areas. So to have a partner that we can trust when a client has a need on the sales side of the house is really a huge value add in our ecosystem. So, Scott and Maura, thank you so much for being here with us today. And Maura, I’d love to start with having you say hello to our attendees.
Maura Kautsky: Yeah. Thank you, Jennifer. Welcome, everybody. I’m actually the president integrator for Sales Xceleration, and just at a high level of who we are, what we do, we are a proven operating and management system for sales. And then you take that with people like Scott, who have incredible talent and experience as leading sales organizations. And that’s what we bring to our client to create those proven systems within their organization. As for my background, I have led the seats of sales and sales and marketing back when a lot of times it was more combined.
And so it gives me a really great perspective on why really, these roles have to be in partnership and how they weren’t in the past, and then really why they have to be two different seats. We’ll talk. I know we want to talk a lot about that today, but there’s very, very clear roles for both roles today. But I’ve spent over 20 years doing just sales and marketing. I always tell everybody, that’s my love, that’s what I know how to do best. And so hopefully I get to share some great insights and observations through the years.
Jennifer Zick: Awesome. Thank you, Maura. Scott, over to you.
Scott Schaefer: Thank you, Jennifer. I’m Scott Schaefer. I have been with Sales Xceleration for a little over five years, and my background includes working in Fortune 500 after college, as well as small businesses. I had run a family business for 15 years, based in Chicago, a $30 million manufacturer, and it was a turnaround situation when I started and we brought it back to prosperity and sold it 15 years later. And that put me back into doing my passion, which is helping small companies improve their sales, and I’ve been doing that ever since. Thank you.
Jennifer Zick: Wonderful. We’re glad to have you with us. Scott. Hi, Barb.
Barb Bertsch: Hi. Thanks for having me. So I’ve been a marketing consultant since about 2015 and have been with Authentic since 2017 in the role of a fractional CMO. I’ve been working with sales teams my entire career, and, you know, my biggest takeaway over the years has been to do more listening to them, less talking at them, and then act on the things that they’re requesting. And, you know, I’m very excited to be on the panel today with the Sales Xceleration folks talking about sales and marketing alignment, which is one of my very favorite topics.
Evolution of sales and marketing roles
Jennifer Zick: Wonderful. We’re glad to have you here at Authentic. Barb is known as one of the CMO whisperers when it comes to strong relationships with sales. So I knew she’d be an awesome addition to today’s panel. And I myself, prior to starting Authentic, had a 20 plus year career that began in sales and then moved into sales management and then moved into marketing. And I want to later on, as we get into this topic, I’m going to talk about how that career path has inspired what we do here and also created the model of what we do and how we do it at Authentic.
Because I think in the more than 25 years that I’ve been in the professional scene, there’s been such a huge change to what it means to be a revenue organization and what the roles are and what the capabilities are required of those leadership roles. So I know, having been in large enterprises and total startups, what the business story often looks like, and that was part of what inspired Authentic. It often looks like a founder has a great idea and you get started and you’re founder-led, and you’re sales-driven because you need to prove you can bring something to market, and then you’re working toward achieving operational critical mass and you’re doing marketing things along the way.
But a lot of the initial marketing things really are kind of in the camp of sales enablement, the collateral and the story that enable you to bring something to market. But eventually marketing, in order to create real growth in an organization, needs to elevate to a more strategic role, to be more inclusive of demand gen and enablement and retention and all those pieces and the way that happens today in a modern marketing engine in today’s world looks very different than how it looked 20 to 25 years ago.
So we’re going to dig into that a bit today because a lot of business leaders really are kind of stuck, they feel kind of stuck on how to model things out. So we’re going to go ahead and dig into the content. And Maura, I would love to start with you and kind of level set on this overall topic. So for the purpose of this discussion, can you talk us through? You had a background a little similar to mine, with combination, but how have the roles of sales and marketing functions changed within entrepreneurial businesses?
Maura Kautsky: Yeah, it’s a great question. I was thinking about this a lot and I’ve got a little analogy that I actually have used in a marketing class I’ve taught because I started like, you know, many of you mentioned a Fortune 500 company and it was a love-hate relationship.
So just to level it. So think about marketing sales, where it’s been, and I do believe it’s grown up. So think about when you’re kids, you have a brother and sister and you run to the parent, you want to tattletale them, they get this, I don’t get that they’re doing this, they’re doing that and understand why. And then you grow up as a teenager and you realize in a young adult, wait a minute, my brother and my, we are actually together on this. It’s us. You know, if we work right, we go to mom and dad with the same message, the same goal, and we align, boy, we’re going to get what we want. So that’s really, to me, kind of where marketing has evolved to.
And it’s interesting when you look at a startup, because I’ve been a part of startups and they’re actually the fun, some of the best places to work. I mean, we’re kind of a semi startup. You start out where the entrepreneur wears the hat of everything. Scott sees this all the time. You guys see it where they’re trying to do everything, but they’re not an expert at anything. They’re just trying things, throwing things out and seeing what works. But they give up on stuff too soon too, because they don’t have the baseline, the education to understand marketing, sales, and how they work together. And so they throw it out the door and think it didn’t work. They try lots of messages. They’re trying to really throw it. And they may try something in marketing and realize they’re not bringing that into the sales scripting mature.
They stumble upon learning. But what they then don’t think to do is now to really take those two skills. What a marketing person does, which is being responsible for warming that lead, educating them. We know today that about anywhere from 75% to 80% of people buying, no matter what it is, a consumer good or b, two b have already done their homework. So sales needs marketing more than ever in an organization to be really giving that unique value proposition. And then the salesperson has to reinforce it. Right.
Because if you have two disconnected messages, then you don’t look like one unified brand. And so those are the areas that I think we’ve seen great improvement. A lot of our advisors go into clients and they work on, you got to pull marketing into the conversation. And a lot of times marketing would go off right into their own little corner or a founder will just go off into this own little corner and they’ll get caught up in the wrong things. So when you bring the two together to build that story, then align on who are we going after as a client and work together, it makes a lot, it makes a big difference in just really where the organization goes.
So it goes back to that look at your brother and sister, your sales and marketing as your partner to drive the organization forward and one cohesive story message goal as you work together.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. Barb, what have you, how would you describe from your vantage point how the role of a marketing leader has evolved in the time that you’ve been in the space and how the mindset of a marketing leader is evolving?
Barb Bertsch: Yeah, I think with the array of technology that we have in the marketplace today, Maura is exactly right. We started out with collateral, or maybe you said this, Jennifer, but collateral and just like, okay, well, what can I send to a customer or whatever to be able to really sit down and level set on what is the customer buyer’s journey? How are they finding us? How has buying changed today? And. Oh, so we need to look at that. Yes, because the more that we know about them, the more that we’re going to be able to shorten that sales cycle.
We know where they’re hanging out and where they show up today. We have all this knowledge that we didn’t have before. So I think that’s one area where we have this opportunity today to leverage the technology and invest there versus guessing we have all these metrics at our fingertips. Tips, let’s start making data driven decisions, because we can’t.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, well, and I often have conversations with CEOs and founders and sales leaders of these entrepreneurial businesses that we serve. And one of the reasons they’re considering Authentic’s help for fractional CMO is because they’ve tried and failed to hire the right marketer or marketers in their business and they really don’t know how to define the role. And I have so much empathy for that because when I first started in this career, there were like five tools in a marketer’s toolkit, right? It was like advertising, PR, creative copy, and look and feel was everything. The marketing team was the team that made the story shine and the things look pretty and spent the advertising dollars.
But now the marketer’s toolkit includes hundreds of different kinds of potential strategies and tools, and thousands of technology systems that could underpin them. And the integration and the data and the analytics and the operational structure, it’s immense. And so just yesterday I was asked by a prospect, how did you evolve from being a sales leader to being a marketing leader? I don’t see that happen. I’m like, that actually cannot happen anymore. Because unless you’ve grown up understanding all the pillars that make up today’s modern marketing function, from brand and message, to data and analytics, to systems and integration, all of those pieces together, it’s a completely different mix than it used to be. Scott, is there anything you would add to this evolution?
Scott Schaefer: There was. You know, at one time, there was a rivalry between sales and marketing when you had both within an organization and that rivalry included, if something wasn’t going well, sales would blame marketing and marketing would blame sales. Right? Even though they’re both working on the same team and with the same company. And I’ve seen that evolve over the years from being rivals with each other. Oh my gosh. Unless we have a good marketing effort, I’m not going to get the leads and sales to be able to actually find business and close on it.
There’s so much noise out there these days that you can’t simply pick up the phone and get somebody’s attention like you could many years ago. They have to have interest in your product when you first approach them. They have to understand a bit about your product right away. The other thing that happens is salespeople tend to, once they get comfortable with a certain number of accounts, they don’t really get aggressive at pursuing new accounts unless they have leads coming in that are marketing qualified, and then that gets them acting again. So both of those things work together.
I’m glad to see that it changed over the years from, you know, we’re rivaling each other to we need to cooperate and work together because the synergy that you get from putting marketing and sales together is absolutely awesome. And I’ve seen more than a few companies succeed with that.
One revenue team concept
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. Well, Scott, this next question is coming right back to you. How would you explain what it really means to be one revenue team that includes both sales and marketing leadership?
Scott Schaefer: Well, that’s a good question, and it’s one that we run into pretty regularly, is ultimately a company survives by growth. You need to be growing or else you’re dying. And that growth needs to be done on everything that’s involved in generating product demand, whether it’s marketing or sales. Working together as one team, the communication is critically important because salespeople are going to have a view of the sales team is going to have a view of what their ideal customer is, and marketing does, too. And we need to be aligned with that early on.
Many times in engagements, we’re expanding from sales and bringing on marketing to come in to help complement sales. And I kind of stress to clients, it’s important that early on, when you engage, say, Sales Xceleration, let’s bring in, they don’t have somebody that’s a good marketing partner. Now let’s bring somebody in, because while we’re building that foundation, that’s where we can really get things working together. You hire a good sales manager, a good marketing manager that knows what the plan is, what we’re doing with that.
We have that infrastructure in place to keep growing. And then they’re working as one team. They’re considered under separate titles. If you look at the classic Els entrepreneurial operating system tree, it has marketing and sales. And I’m glad that they do that because at one time, years ago, when I date myself, sales and marketing were the same. So I’m going to hire a good salesperson, they’re going to do the marketing and everything. Maybe 2030 years ago you could do that, but these days there’s no way even a very small business needs to have those separated but dead working in synergy.
Jennifer Zick: That’s right. I’m glad you brought up the EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. We at Authentic run on EOS. Sales Xceleration runs on EOS. Many of our clients do. Not all, but we love working with clients who have an operating system. And while it’s so wonderful that the model, the baseline model, represents the unified one revenue team kind of model. Sometimes it can set wrong expectations that, like, we need one leader here. And so, you know, as I said, with the, like, the evolution of a business from founder led to sales driven critical mass, the role of marketing starts shifting and needs to be more strategic.
And what we’ve found at Authentic is that by the time a business is growing beyond 5 million, usually they really need to have a marketing leader at the leadership table. They need that executive peer relationship because you need to be thinking you need somebody who’s got that long term brand building value creating mindset and machinery underpinning marketing and somebody who’s leading a team that’s held accountable for right now, pipeline and winning. Right. So it’s a bit of a balancing act to sort that out. Maura, do you have any. Oh, go ahead, Barb.
Barb Bertsch: I was going to interject and kind of to lean in a little bit on what Scott was saying around needing to work together. It’s like there’s no possible way in today’s environment for a marketer like myself coming in, trying to build a foundational element like I was alluding to earlier, for example, on the customer journey, I can’t do that in a silo. I need to understand from the sales people, where are your customers coming from? What do they want from you? What do they want when they get here? What do they want to see on our website? How can we help them be as self-sufficient as possible before they get to somebody?
Because in today’s environment, most people don’t like to talk to other people. Post-pandemic, sales have changed. So how can we provide them with everything possible upfront to arm them with everything they need to make a decision and shorten that sales cycle for the sales team? I can’t make that up. So, I love what you had to say about that. Scott.
Jennifer Zick: Maura, is there anything you’d add about what feels like to be one revenue team?
Maura Kautsky: Yeah, you know, so think about our business model. That’s all we do is focus on sales. Now we’ll bring in marketing partners. Right. But our whole business model is a proven, you know, sales operating management system. So it shows you how quickly that has evolved and the business is twelve years old, that there was a need in the marketplace because to build, you know, the right components for sales. You know, it starts with the team. Right.
Do you have the right people? There’s hunters and farmers. Are they being compensated? Right. But then they’ve got to go in and look at. Does a client really understand all the steps along, you know, the sales process, which starts with marketing, right? Attributing whatever marketing is doing to that sale. Because nowadays, like we talked about, people have looked and are doing their homework, reading stuff. Sales needs to understand what was that buyer’s journey? Did they look at the website? Did they get an email? How did that go?
You know, and I think that’s the piece that people miss, that marketing is responsible for getting the lead, but sales is responsible for closing it. And I love to do this, share this little financial model, because I think it really helps, like entrepreneurs, as I’ve talked to a lot of them over the years. So let’s say I spent $100 on a lead program and that generated ten leads, right? So they’re $10 a piece. So my job is done. I’ve generated leads at $10. I give them to Scott. I gave him ten. He could close too. So now we know that that lead costs $50, right? So do we as a company, can we afford that? Is that built into our revenue model? If not, we should not walk away. We should go. And Scott and I should be talking. Scott, is your team equipped for the script and understanding the advertising that we’re doing? And we go back to marketing. Go.
We now know who responded at what levers we can pull. So this is where we see a lot of sales and marketing teams not working together to really, really get that end deliverable for the client, which is sales at the, you know, the margin that they can pay for. So that’s just kind of, I think where we’ve seen the evolution is that you’ve got people that have to go back and stay in their lane, but then come together to continue to make it better to close the client. Yeah.
Jennifer Zick: One of the most fascinating aspects of revenue team alignment evolution that I’ve seen in recent years is the realization that the sales and marketing relationship is not just a funnel that leads to the point of conversion. And now we have a customer or a client, and the sales marketing work is done. It’s flipping the funnel on the side and saying, now what happens with the client journey in terms of retention and expansion, sell upsell and advocacy, building and referrals and all of those pieces that still requires marketing touch and content to support. And so in the past, even in the digital recent history era and still in many companies, there’s been this tug of war around attribution that creates actually a toxic culture of does marketing get credit for this revenue dollar or do sales get credit for it?
And especially in a B2B complex sales cycle with multiple stakeholders touching into the brand in multiple ways, that turns into a spaghetti soup war pretty quickly. And so where I’ve seen a lot healthier, one revenue team relationship built is when the company can say when we’re all aligned on what the growth goal is and we all know our roles, all ships rise, right. So it’s less about credit to this team or credit to this team. It’s more about what influence marketing is playing in nurturing the relationship all the way through and making it easy for us not to lose track of where there’s opportunity to retain clients and how we support and nurture those relationships. So that’s one piece of like the one revenue team that I like really personally embrace and try to preach to our clients and through our cmos is like, it doesn’t matter who’s getting the credit, the data is important. But like, if the ship is rising and we’re meeting our growth goals, this is about how we partner throughout. So that could be a whole webinar just in itself.
Maura Kautsky: Yeah, it could be.
Building connective tissue between sales and marketing
Jennifer Zick: This is my passion platform right here, but along. Barb, coming back to you. Why is it so critical? Oh, I just kind of set this up. But why? Marketing and sales to work together. But beyond that lead handoff, what that looks like in the role you play with our clients.
Barb Bertsch: Yep. So you kind of hit the nail on the head. The traditional funnel, awareness, consideration, purchase stop. That is not where we’re at. We need to move beyond the purchase and that I walk into so many organizations where that is where it stops and there’s no QBRs happening. We might stop by on our way to St. Cloud to see this person up in Maple Grove or whatever and say hi. Or we might not. There is so much more that can be done to support sales in that area now, and we need to be leveraging. It’s beyond the onboarding of a new customer.
We can’t just hope all goes well from there. We have to retain them and continue to show them value. One example I can use is with another client we implemented ABM and on this ABM slide, which is account based marketing. For those of you that don’t know what that is, on this slide in a QBR, in order to support sales, marketing built this beautiful thing that’s got four quadrants and it’s maybe four different products that the company sells. And you’ve got your agenda down the left hand side and maybe some analytics as to where this customer has been in the last quarter. And you’re really talking about a couple of things in these four quadrants. And the idea is that you want to peak interest with this customer that you have. What’s this thing over here? We’ve never heard about that. Is that something else that you sell? How can we add more value? And we can be like, yeah, that’s one thing I wanted to talk to you about today.
This is an area we really think that you can win in your business. And let’s talk about what that looks like. This slide is now a leaf behind to send along and these quadrants are clickable with more information. That marketing is built in a landing page that provides further information around that. So that’s just one example of things that we can do that’s automated for sales, nurturing campaigns. All these things are running in the background so that the sales team can go out and sell and bring in new business.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, and sales, as our Sales Xceleration friends know even better than anyone else, sales looks different in every company. In some cases, you have sales dedicated just to new business, some that manage a balanced book of business that’s new business and existing accounts. And in some businesses, like at Authentic, for example, once we win a new client, the account management happens in client services. And so it’s not considered sales per se, but it absolutely is still part of the revenue engine. Right.
So there’s a lot of ways that marketing can support that. And that’s part of what we also talk about with our clients. When you look at the total budget, is all of your marketing budget only in demand? Gentle. If you’re a pure startup, that’s where it should be. But if you have a business with clients, you need to shift your marketing investments to be demand gen and retention, nurture, expansion together with sales. Scott and Maura, do you see any of that happening with your clients? And are those conversations, what does that look like in your world?
Scott Schaefer: I’ll start. One of the things you run into a couple of things. First, salespeople tend to think that they are always remembered by prospective clients and current clients, that if I ask somebody about sales consulting, I can say, oh yeah, Scott Schaefer, he does that. The reality is after about three months they may not know who I am, and then they’re going to go back and do a search for sales consulting, trying to find something and they. Oh yeah, the name Scott Schaefer sounds familiar. You know, I kind of remember talking to him at one time, but unless you’re top of mind at the time that the need is actually created, they may not necessarily reach out to you. You can’t expect them to always contact you. And the other thing that happens, and this happens quite a bit, is you may have a customer in your business that you do very well with, but that customer may have other offices or other divisions that may have a need for what you do, but have no clue what you do.
I actually, from actual experience, there was an account that a client had that was very big, nationally was one of their largest accounts, and we were kind of working on diversifying their business a bit in addition to expanding with that account. And it turned out that one of their largest customers had a whole different division, had never heard of them before, but could use their products in different applications than what were being used currently. And unless there was a marketing effort made to generate that recognition, it never would have happened. It never would have been known. And I, as I mentioned, salespeople, once they reach a certain level of sales, they get happy and they don’t realize some of the opportunities that are out there.
They don’t have time to chase down those opportunities unless they come to them. So there’s two factors at work there that are very, very common, and they’re excellent ways to. Excellent opportunities to grow your business.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. I think one of the, like for companies that sell into larger enterprises that have that opportunity to move into other sections and provide value, I think one of the biggest missed opportunities is that a lot of businesses, again, thinking about marketing as demand gen and net new client logos and all of that, think about, okay, we have a case study or a white paper of success in this industry and we’re going to use it to attract more similar new clients out here.
There’s a huge opportunity to remarket that case study into the exact same organization and show the colleagues next door how you’re already building trust and value. You know, remarketing of success back into an account relationship is huge. And I know that at Authentic, our current clients still are attending our webinars, and consumer content like this is supporting the whole relationship. Right? So if we’re thinking lifecycle marketing and sales arm in arm, one revenue team across every single place that we can be building.
Maura Kautsky: Yeah, Jennifer, I’d like to add a little bit to that because we see this a lot where clients get complacent. We talked about that before, where they’ve had this big client and all of a sudden they’ve left and they’re like, well, we don’t know why they left. Well, it’s because you’ve gotten complacent and your competition hasn’t. Right. So marketing is really there to help you keep that, those value adds, you know, offering webinars tools, you know, to the client, make sure they understand how your products evolved. They don’t just miraculously know if you’re not keeping them.
I mean, like, Salesforce does an incredible job of marketing. What’s their latest and greatest feature? So you feel like they’re always evolving for you as an or, you know, as a partner to them. And so I think that that’s what people lose sight of is they just take for granted their existing customers. And that’s where marketing can change the narrative on that for salespeople, because they have jobs, what they do then, a lot of times salespeople are they’ll wait until three months before a contract and then all of a sudden they’re reaching out and then it looks disingenuous. Right. So it’s that kind of, you know, making sure that you do have that ongoing after onboarding. What’s our communication strategy with this client? What’s the value of that client? Because the more value they are to your p and l, then you really got to make sure that you’re adding more steps in managing that relationship and never take it for granted.
Jennifer Zick: That’s so important. Thank you for that. Scott, from your vantage point, what are some practical tips for building what I like to call connective tissue between sales and marketing, between the teams and the leadership?
Scott Schaefer: It’s a good question, and I’m obviously a proponent of CRM systems, customer relationship management systems. I’m not a proponent of having that rule the world, so to speak. I think it’s a tool that you use as part of your toolbox, and it can be used so that when we do get marketing qualified leads on the sales end, we can share the progress of those leads with the marketing side so they can see if there are objections that we’re running into. If something gets stalled as it moves through the sales process, what’s causing those stalls? Is there something that marketing could be doing to communicate better on messaging in order to have a smooth transition? I like to think that customers that have a long sales cycle tend to forget when something gets stalled somewhere on one of the stages of sales and they can’t figure out why. Well, maybe it was something very simple that the customer didn’t know about, that they could have known early on. From a marketing perspective, marketing gets that feedback and then they can realign to work in that regard too.
So I think, and I wouldn’t expect somebody managing the marketing team to be monitoring every single lead that goes through, but communication back and forth is if you get stuck somewhere from a sales perspective, I am going to reach out to the marketing manager and say, hey, I need some help here. I’m pretty good at sales, but I don’t know why we’re not moving along. What would you suggest? What can we do to keep things going? That kind of communication is extremely important.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah. And I love that you point to two sides of communication there, the data communication and the insights that we can have if we’re watching it from our various vantage points. And the verbal communication of this is what I see from my seat. What are you seeing from your seat? And I think yesterday I was actually on a webinar specific on the topic of CRM. And that totally is a huge topic that has changed radically in my career timeframe in terms of how it’s used and what problems it solves.
Because when I first I worked in the salesforce ecosystem for 15 years, and when I first started selling into that ecosystem, it was buying the solution and then it became sales managers buying it so that they didn’t lose the data when sales members left the company. And then it shifted over to marketing, making CRM decisions and budgets because of the intersection of marketing automation and digital on top of CRM and the full customer view. Right. And so it’s that without a CRM, I don’t know that you have a business.
That’s my very strong point on that. Because any business selling anything hinges on relationships. And if you don’t have a view on those relationships and an understanding of what’s working to nurture them and what’s not working, then what value are you creating as a business? But Barb, do you want to speak a little to the other side of connective tissue in terms of the relationship that you forge? I know within our methodology there’s a cadence for connectivity with sales leaders and leadership team. How does that support the connective tissue?
Barb Bertsch: Right. So when I looked at this question, I thought of weekly structured meetings. You know, salespeople do not generally like meetings, and I understand that it pulls them away. But if you take the sales leader and the marketing leader or marketing team along with that sales leader, and you have a weekly cadence and it’s set up in a structured way, like EOS provides, for example, where you have an agenda and it’s the same every week, and you meet at the same time every week. And you talk about, you know, personal and professional best from the week before. From both perspectives.
You’re looking at a scorecard every week that you’ve agreed on. These are the metrics that we’re going to look at on a weekly basis, leveraging that CRM as a single source of truth, by the way, and reviewing all the action items that came out of the last meeting. So these meetings are not a waste of time. We have actionable things that we’re both working on to come to the table to make sure we’re as strategic as possible. We’re living through the full funnel. We’re doing everything we can to support sales from the marketing perspective, reminding them that we are there to support them and what they’re doing for their overall company and then spending the, sorry. It’s the majority of the time discussing any issues and solving where we can. And I think really listening to the sales folks during those meetings and understanding where they’re coming from is a key.
And I think that does build, what you said, connective tissue between the two in a weekly, on a weekly basis. It also strengthens your personal relationship with that individual as well.
How to create a culture of accountability
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. Because alignment and accountability don’t happen by accident, and they don’t happen on islands separated from each other. So I love that. Maura, from your perspective, how can business leaders create a culture of accountability without, like, toxic competition and finger pointing?
Maura Kautsky: Yeah, you know what? And it’s so important. You know, it really starts with which is what the core of our culture is, that kind of servant leadership, realizing you’re serving each other, to serve the greater good of the client with the product that you bring them. So I think if you get everybody from upper leadership to sales and marketing all on the same page as the goals, what’s our real unique value proposition that we’re offering as an organization? And then you have data and reports that you can look at what’s happening in marketing, what’s happening in sales to meet those goals and then communicate. Right. So it’s that alignment and that communication and then really looking at it is everybody has the same goal. That’s the piece. A lot of times that people forget. Right.
I think you said that at the beginning, Jennifer, that we’re all here to grow the company and to serve the clients, you know, and bring that value proposition to them of that, you know, whatever it is they need that technology, you know, that widget or whatever it is. And so trying never to lose sight of that and so it takes the personal out of it and it makes it very much a professional conversation of how are we going to do that? And then, you know, how are we going to keep on going engagement with that client to make them happy and everyone have clear roles and responsibilities. And I think that that’s the ticket. And, you know, we talked about EOS a lot and that’s why they have accountability charts. So making it very clear that everyone understands what they’re accountable for and has the same goals and they communicate. That’s it.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. What are some of the maybe marks of a healthy culture in sales and marketing that you’ve observed in some of the client accounts that you’ve worked? Scott, I’ll direct.
Scott Schaefer: As we talked before, there is a little bit of a rivalry sometimes, but the clients smaller businesses, typically when they do, when they do have separate sales and marketing, I see them act very strongly when they work in each other’s roles to a degree. So somebody in marketing will travel with a salesperson or a sales manager for a day or two to get a feel. They can learn things.
Sometimes it helps to have a second set of eyes with your salesperson, because things can be brought up that you had never considered or ideas could be brought up that you might think. I could never really bring that up with a client when in fact, you know, the marketing person can come in there and say, if something goes south, they say, well, you know, the marketing person doesn’t know the sales of it. That never happens. It’s always the marketing person who is going to bring up ideas that the customer is going to like or the customer is going to have ideas that sales doesn’t catch. But marketing says we can do something to appeal to that audience. Large businesses tend to be more siloed in that regard because people don’t know each other as well.
There’s different divisions, but when they have meetings, it used to be that companies would have marketing meetings and sales meetings. The ones that really succeed today. Combine the two, they’re together, they’re on the same flow. Sales is sharing what we need to do to close the short term. The tools that they need. Marketing is looking at what we need to do over the next six to twelve months to get those tools in place, and what could we be doing that sales that’s recognized and they communicate that on the spot. It makes a huge difference. It’s a great dynamic to have.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah. If you’ve got a sales kickoff as an organization, then you should have a marketing leader and the marketing team members in the room. And as somebody who has led in both sales and marketing, if you have a diamond club trip and your marketer is working to elevate revenue with sales, then there should be a revenue team mentality around that too. What? You know, how did we all lift this ship? So.
All right, so, Barb, we’re getting close to the point where we’ve got time for a couple more questions here for the panel. And then for those of you listening in today, if you’ve got a question for us on this topic or a specific piece of it, drop it into the q and a. We would love to take a little time to address some of your questions today. So I see we’ve got one question already. Keep them coming. We’ll make some space for that.
So, Barb as a CMO, working with a lot of different kinds of clients, what suggestions do you have for marketing leaders, your peers, when they step into a new role, how can they best? Let’s say you’re stepping in as a new marketing leader into a company with an established sales team. What can you do to set the stage for strong collaboration right out of the gates?
Fostering strong collaboration between sales and marketing
Barb Bertsch: I love this question for me, I’ll just speak from experience and what I know works for me just about every time it’s setting up that introductory meeting with sales or asked to be invited to their weekly sales meeting where you can build your introductory listen and learn and introduce yourself at that time, set up one on one meetings. I do this on a quarterly basis. Like I said earlier, salespeople don’t love meetings. But I have found that a quarterly marketing and sales catch up has worked well for my clients.
And it’s with every salesperson, it’s one on one. It’s 30 minutes. It’s what’s working, what’s not. Tell me about the CRM tool, whether it’s HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever they’re using. Are there any questions or things that I can help you with and support you there? What are you using for your messaging when you’re doing outbound emails? Is there anything I can do to help? These meetings are very, very effective and build rapport and respect and personal relationships as well. Do some ride-alongs, I said, listening is one of the most important things you can do. You can’t sometimes fathom what a salesperson goes through when they walk into a customer or a prospect and they’re telling you these things and you’re like, yeah, no, that’s not happening. Well, do some ride-alongs and see for yourself. It’s really going to help again build that rapport with them. You’re driving in a car, you’re flying on the road, you’re experiencing the journey together.
We all know what comes with travel sometimes. So it’s a really good bonding experience all the way around. After you build your plan as a marketer, share it. If you’re building things in a silo, if you’re building sequences that they can use within HubSpot, for example, and you’re not sharing the messaging, and they go to look at it and they’re like, wait a second, I don’t want this coming from me. You haven’t done your job and you haven’t done what you can to build that collaboration. Educate marketing is a long term play, and as we mentioned earlier, how things are changing and evolving so quickly in the world of marketing and sales. It’s important to say, you know, here’s what I think we should do in order to meet your needs, and here’s why I think we should do it. And here’s what’s changed from when things were happening five years ago. I think that’s really, really important. And then you can identify if there’s any quick wins that we can do too. So listen and act are my two biggest takeaways there.
Jennifer Zick: Thank you, Barb, that’s great. Scott, what about you? From the flip side of that coin, you’re walking into an organization and there’s a marketing leader and team and you’re coming in to help support the sales organization or pretend you’re the new sales leader, fractionally or otherwise. How do you quickly build good connections and relationships?
Scott Schaefer: I’d like to learn and primarily focus on listening. What are they targeting for market segments? How are they going about doing that? What are they doing digitally to go after particular market segments? And in the back of my head I’m always thinking, okay, how can I digest this into what the sales team should be focusing on to capitalize on that? But that’s a learning process and the circumstances are coming in as I’m a new person.
The general view is, especially in consulting, the view is, well, you don’t know my products and my processes and so on. And I stress, no, I don’t. You’re the expert at that. That’s why I’m working with you. I know the sales end of it and you need to have a marketing end of it too. There are experts at that and by us working together, the key is to grow revenue. And if they have a marketing infrastructure in place, I want to understand that structure and see how we can tie it to work closely with sales.
Jennifer Zick: That’s great, Maura. You’ve seen both sides of sales and marketing. So what is your advice for a new entrant to that relationship?
Maura Kautsky: Yeah, you know, I think that Scott and Barb have some really, really great points. You know, I think it has to start with, you know, those kind of fearless conversations that when you come in, what’s the clarity of ownership for each role and that you both understand it and respect it. And then I know what my lane is and they know what their lane is, and then how are we going to work together? Like I said, go back to that common good. But Barb said, you have to develop a relationship. I mean, some of my greatest friends ended up being later in my career when we became more copacetic.
But early on, I didn’t get along with a lot of salespeople because it was a lot of finger pointing. You know, just, you know, just as much as marketing. But then when business has evolved and people realize that they have to work together to really drive the results and the investment for the company, because these are two very large line items. Right. Marketing and sales expenses.
So I think it really goes back to clear accountability of who’s doing what. And then going back, like we’ve all continued to say, is open dialogue, having those same page meetings, getting together, looking at data and doing it through a data lens versus so it doesn’t become finger pointing. We talked about that earlier. If you use data and facts, then you can’t get into a conversation that someone feels attacked or takes it personally. And that’s a really important component of working together with someone in a collective way.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, I love that. Fearless conversations and clarity of role with a shared poll. That’s brilliant. Yes.
Maura Kautsky: Okay.
Audience Q+A
Jennifer Zick: Well, we’re at the point where we’ve got some wonderful questions from the audience, so I’m going to pull some of these through. And thank you to our audience. Megan is asking, I love this question. Does it make sense for both marketing leader and sales leader to report to the chief revenue officer? Or should marketing have its own seat at the executive table? Who wants to go first?
Scott Schaefer: That’s an awesome question. Typically, they’ll both be reporting to the CEO or somebody that’s higher up in the organization. There is a point where revenue grows to a degree where you do need to have a chief revenue officer, and they would be reporting to that chief revenue officer. But each company is different there. When you see both sides starting to get a bit overwhelmed by their role. And they need to have somebody that’s involved on the revenue side strictly instead of overall company operations. That’s when you really know that we need to have a CRO that’s coordinating both of those things, in my opinion.
Maura Kautsky: Jennifer, I have a different perspective too on this. So it really depends on how it’s structured, because we’re talking about a lot of small and entrepreneurial businesses. You may have a chief revenue officer, but if they have a bunch of fractional people like you and I that they’re working on the team, they have to be equipped to report up, you know, and represent both of those people. But when you do get into the time where you can invest as an organization, they do need to be two very clear and distinct if you want the expertise inside of your organization who is also still managing vendors.
So I think the only time it makes sense to me is when you have fractional support experts, you know, that are supporting you, where that can work for everything going. But when you get into the employee part, it does need to be clear and distinct, because there are two very different skill sets and two very different goals and responsibilities. And I think we’ve touched on some of those today. But as you know, there’s so much more.
Jennifer Zick: Absolutely. You know, we have a bias because of how our business is modeled, and we’ve modeled ourselves this way because of our bias. And our bias is this based on our experience as marketers who’ve grown through the radical evolution of marketing over the last 25 years. If you’re past 5 million in revenue, you need an executive marketing leader with a holistic purview across all the pieces. But you don’t necessarily need that person full time. And the reality is, most businesses don’t need a true full time employed CMO or executive vp of marketing until they’re right around 100 million in revenue.
And so before you reach that milestone, for most of the clients that we work with, you need great sales leadership and a sales team. You need great marketing leadership and marketing capabilities, internal, external, the right combination. But then the work that we do as fractional cmos, our role is long term in the maturity of that marketing organization. And so we do sit on the leadership team with our clients. I think the one caution I’d give, because we’re speaking primarily to small growth businesses, the five to 100 million, in terms of this webinar series, is that there is a pull toward the title of a chief revenue officer, because it feels like you’re solving a lot with one person. But the reality of how that operates inside of a small business usually looks like 99% of the time a sales manager who’s asked to have marketing roll up to them. And sales managers don’t have the holistic view of what a modern marketing engine requires.
And so that creates an imbalance where it’s putting marketing under the sales organization who needs to stay focused on what’s in front of them rather than a long term brand building, marketing engine building perspective. So that’s the caution I give. Like, don’t get enticed by a CRO title thinking that you can lump it all together when you’re small. It’s even more critical to have senior level expertise who knows how to scale, and that they’re at the table with the visionary and the CEO and the CFO, and that you’re getting it aligned right. So I hope all those perspectives gave you some kind of direction there, Megan. There’s a lot to think about.
Maura Kautsky: Yeah.
Jennifer Zick: All right, our next question comes from Becky. Theirs is an EOS run company, so she wants to know, what kind of scorecard metrics do you recommend? Best practice that might be combined. If you’re doing that marketing biz dev sales level ten meeting, we call that “smarketing”. What’s the smarketing scorecard?
Maura Kautsky: Well, Becky, if you’re on EO or 90 IO, we just put actually a scorecard out into the system that is answering that question. So that’s the good news if you’re on 90 IO, but if not, you really need to think about it from, you know, the whole point of your weekly scorecard is the metrics that are moving the organization forward. So, you know, marketing should be talking about how many leads they should be reporting on. What if their leads convert just like sales is talking about so that you can see the delta? Right. If sales close ten did. Five of those come from marketing. So that’s where people start to see the connection point. So those are kind of some of the things.
And then I think client retention has got to be another important metric as you really look at the holistic thing that we’ve been talking about, because that’s an early indicator if you have a problem. So remembering to find those things that are showing growth or early indicators of going backwards.
Barb Bertsch: And I have a perspective on this, too. I agree with what Maura said, but if you’re coming into an organization. Well, first I’m going to say it depends. It depends on your goals. It depends where you’re at as an organization. If you’re. If marketing is brand new, you may not have an established process in place yet to bring leads in. So it’s one of those leading indicators that you can measure today, web traffic. If you’re starting to build just brand awareness and you’re not even focused on bringing leads in yet, you need to build brand awareness. Then let’s start measuring web traffic, for example. So it’s things like that that you have to consider is like, what are our overall business goals and ourselves to those.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah. Knowing where you are on the maturity matrix is important because we work with clients that have nothing in terms of technology and process, so they don’t have a baseline to start from. And so sometimes it’s like, well, how do we even make it, how do we know if we’re on track? And so for those early stage companies, I like to encourage them to like first track activities. Activities will give you data, data will give you metrics. Metrics will give you insight, but that has to build over time. So it is true that your dashboards evolve as your business evolves with the right metrics to power that. But once you get those metrics in place, they are powerful. Scott, are there any other pieces you would suggest in terms of scorecarding?
Scott Schaefer: Well, when you’re setting quarterly rock, you want to include both marketing initiatives as well as what sales initiatives are. And then on level ten meetings, if you’re IDS-ing things, you just want to see how you’re progressing. I think that Barb hit the nail on the head, when she mentioned it’s a new marketing organization, it’s going to take some time before they can. I’ll use the phrase traction. But before you really get traction in marketing, at the same time, sales is going to be looking for those marketing qualified leads coming in. So you have some metrics that you can work with that you track on a weekly basis between the two. And usually after the first quarter, second quarter, you get more into alignment on what those metrics are and how to hit them. It takes a little bit of time if it’s a new organization there.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, absolutely. So one of our attendees wants to know, what if you do have kind of a legacy sales and marketing combined role mindset, how do you start to separate the two and create meaningful revenue results? And they added quickly with an asterisk. Okay, an asterisk. Nothing. I like to say there’s nothing automagical about all the hard work that goes into sales and marketing. What are some of the steps that could be taken there. Okay, I’ll start while you all ponder this question.
This right here is also part of the reason that Authentic exists. Because there, you know, there’s no business in which there is a leader in a role that doesn’t feel strongly about something, about their role. Right. Nobody as a leader really wants to see part of their responsibility and their turf just taken out from under them. But most leaders who are values aligned, focused on the goal are very happy to bring partners along in growth so that it puts them more into their sweet spot, so that everybody’s growing in the right direction.
So while this can sometimes be a sensitive topic, for instance, if you have a leader who thinks they can definitely manage both, but the organization is aware that, no, we need two different functions here. Sometimes bringing in a third party partner who’s not vying for the job. Right. So when you can bring a fractional leader in to say, I’m going to come and help assess your sales, architecture and infrastructure, help you identify all the right people, right seats, roles and how you can stage for growth. We’re going to bring in a fractional marketing leader to help you assess where you’re at and what you’re going to need to reach your growth goals. So that’s one really good avenue to start looking really with an outside lens into your business and advising so that you all can make the right decisions together about how to divide responsibilities and stay aligned.
Scott Schaefer: There’s a point where both sides lose productivity if they’re trying to do each other’s role and they don’t want to admit that they’re losing productivity. And sometimes they don’t recognize that sales is doing too much, spending too much time trying to do digital marketing and that marketing is trying to contact specific customers and so on. It’s not uncommon, once the company reaches a certain size to see that.
And Jen, you hit it right in that as outside consultants, we can come in and coach them, giving them a new perspective. It isn’t, we’re not culturalized with that particular company and we can identify those things and have those one on one conversations with each partner to say, hey, you know, let’s focus more on what you can do to grow business and the same side, bringing in somebody from marketing can focus on that. It is a matter of managing ego.
And if you have two really good divisions that are performing well with that regard, it takes some experience and it takes a lot of listening and to get people past that. But sometimes a new face coming in there to talk about that with some expertise carries a lot of clout.
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, absolutely. All right, there’s one last question from the audience, and the question from Jim is, what is a reasonable balance of expense between sales and marketing in a two to $3 million business with a 25% sales goals? So they’re trying to grow by 25%, 25% revenue year over year. How would you advise that?
Scott Schaefer: Also a very good question from a sales perspective. I think anytime you add an investment into the company, especially in people, you want to get an idea. I always look at it very simply. How much do I need to sell to cover the cost of this new person? All their cost, all in. How much do they need to produce? And I don’t want to get into a lot of financial stuff. That’s not what we’re here for. I can look at the contribution margin of a company or how much it makes per item that it’s sold and get a pretty good idea. If we had a new salesperson, that person needs to produce at least this much to cover their costs and break even, and then they’re making money.
That same measure can work for marketing in terms of what kind of an impact does a marketing initiative need to have to cover the cost of that and to grow it? So growing revenue 25%. You know, if you’re a million and you want to get to 1,250,000 of that 250,000, you can break out what your marketing and sales investment would need to be to get that growth. If I get it in any more detail, I think I’m going to get put people to sleep. But that’s kind of how we look at it.
Jennifer Zick: I love that you’re approaching it from the numbers and what I would add just from a purely functional business stage and growth, kind of looking across the ecosystem and remembering Authentic is six years old, right? So it wasn’t that long ago we were in this place, but we were growing our revenues a little more aggressively. But the reality is, until you’re about a three and a half to $5 million company, you are primarily a selling company.
You have to sell, sell, sell, make sure you’re getting new revenue and that you can retain the revenue you bring in. You are a sales driven organization at that point. You have to build a brand along the way. And this is why marketing is often tucked under sales in the early days, because it’s sales enablement, branding, it’s reputation, branding, it’s powering them to get out and sell. Okay, so like when we were that size and stage we worked with agency partners and content. We were always committed to creating content. We’ve always been a very marketing, obviously driven kind of a company.
But until you sell your way into repeatable revenue growth and consistent margins, you’re going to want to invest, invest in sales and make sure your brand is well articulated in the sales process and keep building that critical mass. And so there’s a huge fat, it depends on every industry, right? We work with B2C clients where they don’t have a sales team. It’s all marketing budget and that’s where the money goes. And then we work with SaaS companies who are pre revenue funded with very different models. So there’s always a big, it depends, but if you’re growing an organic B2B, professional services or traditional model business, you’re going to have to sell into creating the space for more strategic marketing budgets over time. And I don’t say that to diminish the role of marketing, but at that point the founders and the salespeople, they are the brand. They’re the brand.
Maura Kautsky: Yeah, yeah, I back that up and I think Jen had it right on point. And I think Jim, if you kind of then look at you said you have a 25% sales goal so you do need to be heavily weighted towards, you know, to sales and then maybe just, you know, 5% to marketing like Jen. So the fundamentals, the unique value proposition, the brand building message to make sure you’re on point because you can send a salesperson out there with a bad value prop and then it hurts them. So I think if you’re going to do anything in marketing, it’s that brand. That’s it. What’s that story? What’s that value we provide?
Jennifer Zick: Yeah, yeah. One of my favorite quotes of all time was from a former colleague of mine who said, you know, you can overinvest in market and all the marketing technology and the digital and you can expand and push your message out, but if you don’t have the right message, you’re just making your brand suck faster to more people. Right? Yes, fine tune the message. And that hard work happens in the connective tissue between sales and good listening between sales and marketing and that’s how it evolves. So, gosh, we could go on and on. This has been such a fun conversation and no animosity on either side of the table. Like, we’re all friends here, let us go.
All right, well, we want to thank all of our guests today. Thank you for joining us. For this time we’ll be sending out a recap. We’d love for you to share it, and we all would love to stay connected with you. So you have our names, we’re on LinkedIn. Our companies are here as resources for you in your continued growth. So we’re cheering you on. We wish you all the best and go forth and shine your lights and go build some revenue today. We’ll see you next time.
Ready to Overcome Random Acts of Marketing®? We’re here to help you take the next right step.
