Tips To Do Marketing The Sales Team Loves (Live Q&A)

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Exit.

Hey, I have something a little different for you. On this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. This was a conversation with myself, Colin White, who is head of Demand Gen at Clearbit, Tara Robertson, who is Senior Manager of DemandGen at Chili Piper, and Matthew Ferris, who is senior Sales Director.

For Strategic Accounts at Bombora.

We recorded about an hour conversation for a session with Clearbit called marketing sells. That's clearbit.com if you go clearbit.com resources series, marketing sales. I'll link it. You can go and check it out.

They're doing a cool thing.

I don't know why I tried to read that URL. I'm just going to put it in the show notes. But we had a conversation and I thought it was a really good one, focused on sales and there's a lot that came up about sales and marketing alignment. And midway through we were recording and I scribbled to myself on my notepad. I would love to have this audio and run it on the Exit 5 podcast because this type of stuff comes up a lot and I thought that we had some helpful answers for people based on questions that I see come up a lot. So I reached out to Colin from Clearbit and I said, hey, can I have that audio? Can we run it on the Exit 5 podcast? And he was nice enough to do that. So that's what this conversation is. I think you're gonna like it. I will link to the Clearbit page in the show notes and I'll talk to you right now on the podcast.

Hello everyone and welcome to. Yeah, a lovely Q and A session we're gonna be doing today. Glad to see everyone. I'm gonna do like the quick housekeeping stuff that everyone does at the start of a virtual event webinar. You know the basics. Close your windows for the best performance. Questions are encouraged. This is a Q and A. We have some stuff pre baked that people have submitted, but put anything in chat or in the questions tab down below for everybody, including speakers. Hit that bell icon at the top of chat. Believe me, you don't want that happening. Yeah. As you're speaking and then yes, 100% the recording is going to be available. You'll get that automatically at the end. Cool. Let's hop into it and do some introductions. We have quite a few people on the line here. I'll start for me. I'm Colin, head of Demand Gen here at Clearbit. And yeah, I'll pass it off to Dave, maybe you next. Sure.

Hey, I'm Dave. Dave Gearhart. I used to work in B2B SaaS as a VP of marketing and CMO at two companies called Drift and Privy. Now I spend my time helping B2B startups directly with marketing. I have a consulting business that I run myself, which is me, my team. And then I also run a community for B2B marketers called Exit 5, which is Exit5.com. There's a community of 3,000 B2B marketing pros which I know a bunch of you are in. And then also we have a podcast focus on B2B marketing and good to see you all. Happy to be here.

Matt, how about you? You go.

Hey everyone. Matt Ferris. Happy to be part of the conversation today. Been in B2B marketing or B2B ad tech pretty much my whole career. Started off at Wall Street Journal, went over to a company called Bizo. We were acquired by LinkedIn. Then I got into the B2B data space afterwards over at D and B and now I'm heading up the enterprise sales team over here at Bombora. So excited to talk to you all today.

Tara, want to do a little intro?

Sure. Thanks Colin. Happy to be here today too. Feel like I have to say that everyone's been saying it, but I'm really happy to be here. So I run our demand gen programs over at a Chili Piper and I also host our podcast Demand Gen Chat. So spend a lot of time talking to demand gen and various types of marketers.

Awesome. Cool. Well, let's get into it. We're going to just go through some questions and then anyone on the line, please feel free again to ask anything in chat or in the questions tab and we'll get to them. This was an interesting one that came in. I think we're seeing this all over the place as B2B marketers and all around in the Martech space. But basically how can marketers get buy in from leadership to be closer aligned to a revenue metric? Pipeline revenue, something else for their business. Dave, you talk a lot about this being measured on pipeline. I'm curious to hear your take.

So I think on the surface the question is tough to diagnose most marketing things. I think it's easy for me or you or whoever we say like definitive things on LinkedIn and everyone goes nuts. And. But there's so much nuance in all marketing advice. And so like, how do you get buy in from leadership to be closer aligned to revenue metrics? Well, is that because you've, you're just not clear what the goal is and you've never had the conversation, or is it because like your, your CEO is an and like, doesn't believe in marketing in the same way? And so like, and I've seen all the spectrums. And so I think like, first is like, I just would work all the way back to like, do we have a clear goal for marketing at this company? And if the four of us are on the marketing team and we ask that question we all have, we're all either going to have no answer, we're all going to have different answers, or all going to have one clear answer. And so if you don't have one clear answer, then it's like, okay, shoot, before we jump to step 10, let's just like very slowly break this down in the simplest fashion. Like, okay, well what is, what are the founders and CEO or coo whoever, what do they see the role of marketing at this company? Oh, at Chili Piper, Marketing exists to build pipeline because we need meetings for our sales team. Great. Like, I'm sure that that gives Tara and the team like a way to like work backwards from that. And so I think it's all got to come back to like the first principles. Kind of like, what is the function of marketing for the company? What are those goals? But it's also different on the stage and time. Like when I joined Drift, for example, it just was a different company at a different time. They raised $15 million before they were like really actively pushing their product. And so when I got hired there, it was like as marketing manager Dave. And my goal was, my goal from the founders was like, hey, we want you to help us build an audience so when we launch, we have people to market to. Now if you were at Drift today, that would be a much different story. So it's got to come back to like the first everyone having a clear definition of like, what is marketing here to do? And then what are the very clear goals that we have that work back to revenue? Whether that's sales meetings, whether that's product signups, it depends on the go to market motion of your company.

Yeah, I like that. Kind of get away from the metric piece and talk about the overall strategy. Like, what's the purpose of marketing at your company instead?

Well, yeah, how are we going to sell this product to our customers. Like, do we have a, is it a very enterprise field level, we have a hundred accounts approach or is it, hey, we have a free version of this product and we want, we need thousands of people to sign up for. And so I think like being able to match those with, being able to articulate not just the goal but like what is our go to market strategy? Because most of Us are at SaaS, companies that are on this thing today, right. And it's like so much of your go to market strategy is going to be dictated by the product and the thing that you're selling and the, and the, the motion that you're going through. Like Matt's nodding his head coming from the sales side of things. But like it's all got to be baked there. And so if you have a heavy content, high traffic marketing mix, but your sale is much more enterprise outbound, like that's also going to break. So there's a bunch of different layers in there that I think you have to be able to go and get on the same page about. And it's not just marketing, it's marketing, it's product, it's sales, it's customer success, it's everybody being clear on what is the role across the company.

Matt, I've got a follow up for you. Go ahead. Actually, but I have a question after.

Yeah, I mean I couldn't agree more with what Dave says that we all have to align to this one goal. But I think coming from a sales perspective too is that if you need to get buy in challenge and ask your partners and your vendors, they have to provide a solution that's going to achieve those goals and those metrics aligned to them and have them do the work for you. Make sure they're building out an ROI calculator. When we work with our prospects and our teams is mandated by our team, like you have to bake and try to begin to get some ROI out of it because marketers don't want to buy things that's not going to generate more revenue for them. So that's something I always look at it.

Yeah, I have a question for you too. Along this line from the sales perspective, what do you want marketing to be responsible for? What do you think our goal should be?

Yeah, I mean where I look at how from our world.

Frisbees.

Yeah, Frisbee.

Yeah.

I just want, you know, I want you guys to bring it all the way down. 90% done. And I can literally, you know, I can old school. Can I? I'll just mail them an order form and they'll sign it, mail it back.

To me with the ideal state. Yeah, absolutely.

Or just, just Venmo. My account. What I1 and I actually like what we have at Bombora is that we used to have this. We really didn't have ABM until about a, a year ago is that we're actually all at least aligned on the accounts we want to go after and the Personas we want to go after. So we did this whole analysis, like, here are the accounts we care about, here's the good fit. We actually used our historical data and got ops and strategy involved to be like, yeah, this is where we win and this is where we lose. And so what I really just want is I think go back to Dave's common goals, the metric piece we're still developing. I, I'm not going to sit here and tell marketing how to measure their engagement and you know, how they're breaking in. Like I do want to just at some point have someone to talk to. But right now I just want the fact that we're aligned on the Personas we're aligned after the accounts to go after. To me, that is a huge win.

I love that. Yeah. Aligned goals. It's pretty simple. Hey, when you really break it down. Not rocket science. Yeah.

I think another way to look at this question is no matter what size your company is, you're probably bringing in some customers today. So just digging into where they're coming from, how are they finding out about you? And then just asking, hey, can I double down on these two or three things? I can't really see any exact team that would say no to that, at least as a start.

Yeah. Love it. Cool. Let's flip to the next one which is sort of like a planning question. It's almost a follow up. Yeah. During like sort of planning season, whatever that looks like for anyone. How closely should marketing and sales work together to get to the number? To get to sort of the plan to get the number, I guess is maybe the background of the question. You know, I think hand in hand. I think hand in hand it is a question. I don't know. Curious your thought though.

I mean I can only speak to like again, like I don't have definitive advice, but I can speak to like what the process that I've seen at companies that I've been at or am working with. And, and I think typically the way that companies get to that number is they say, okay, the founders and the board and management team or whoever they set Some goal for how much they want the company to grow the following year. From there they figure out, well, what. Usually it's pipeline. How much pipeline do we need in order to get there? Then from there we're going to think about, well, where does the pipeline come from? Okay, well, in our business, 70% of it is sourced from is inbound marketing. 30% of it is the partner channel and sales motion. Okay, so marketing, again, marketing doesn't own the entire revenue piece. Like, it's important that marketing owns revenue as a marketing function. But there's often multiple inputs into that. And so I think it has to be at the team level. Okay, marketing, you own this number. Sales, you own this number. Channel, you own this number. And there's a leader of each one of those functions. And like, they're each working with their team to get there. Now, there's also a lot of nuance because they're often helping. When you help each, you're ultimately trying to achieve one company goal. And so when you can help each other, your goal might becomes easier. So what if marketing could help sales close more deals somehow? Should we be spending more time blogging or should we develop X resource? And that's not a knock on blogging like that. That definitely can work, but it's more like, should we carve out some resources to like, hey, I'm going to go talk to Matt and we're going to have a conversation. Like, I think you, you work on the plan together, like the management team or the board says, like, here are the goals. Okay, now we're in planning season, and so we're gonna go talk. It's never just like a black and white, like one email thing. It's like, all right, hey, we got to get to this number next year. Let's look at all the things that we're doing across the whole revenue function of the business. Let's look at product, let's look at marketing, let's look at sales. Let's look at customer success. What are the levers that we think that we have? And then you're basically placing bets. Like, I think the companies that I've been at or seen usually going into the year, it's not like you should have this plan and there's a hundred levers in. And it's like, hey, we have this plan and here's kind of two or three levers that we think we can pull to get here. Okay, so now we're on the whiteboard. We're starting to figure out like, okay, this is okay, One lever in marketing might be if we start this new program. One lever in sales is like, we actually haven't gone after these new accounts. One lever in customer success is actually right now we don't have a strong expansion motion. Okay, well, is that a customer success thing or is it a product thing? Is there new stuff that we should be building? So ideally the answer is everybody needs to be working on this together. And also it can't just be like. We've talked a lot about the importance of marketing and sales alignment, but let's say that marketing and sales went and created their plan, but they didn't talk to product and they didn't talk to customer success and they didn't talk to. That's also going to fail. And so I think it's not just marketing and sales. It's like the whole company has to be aligned on creating this plan. Marketing is one channel. Just like sales is one channel. Just like channel is one is one channel, for lack of a better word.

I don't know about any of you, but I've definitely seen some of it break down mostly when like goals feel very dictated and there isn't. Isn't that bottoms up feedback, Any experience any of you have with that?

Yeah, I ran into that a little bit at my last place. We had a pretty big inbound sales team. I, we don't have that specifically at Chili Piper now, but at my last place we basically were passing MQLS to an inbound team and we basically just said, hey, your new target is, I can't remember the number, say 35 meetings a month. And they just told us if the leads are going to be the same as what you're giving us now, like there's no way in hell. Basically it was the conversation. So there was some back and forth, but obviously they had to have a little bit of trust in us to have that frank conversation because it was the junior reps coming to us and saying that, yeah, yeah.

Even just having the ability to have the conversation sometimes is tough at certain companies.

Yeah, go ahead. My last company, we were owned by a private equity firm. So of course they ran their own models and their own analysis and tried to hand those down. But I think about working together, it's really great when you have. It doesn't always happen this way. And then some people might disagree, but when all the teams, marketing, customer success or CX and sales all roll out to a COO or CRO Chief Commercial Officer. And so we're lucky that we have that here at Bombora So we do unify. Our biggest thing is we're usually late to planning. And so I think one thing my goal is planning really needs to start probably at the end of this month. I need to get everyone together. And we need to get together, like, okay, here's what we are planning to do this year. Here's what we're forecasting. You know, let's maybe like, add 5% to that and then let's go, like, here's how much more money we want finance. So it's a lot more fun when you can. Dave Skittles point. Like, it's everyone versus finance, and we're asking for more money because we want to do more things. Doesn't always work that way. But that's kind of my goal this year is like, I want to literally charge them in September with like, here's what we want.

It's almost like this is why people battle so much over, like, marketing attribution. It's like, it's just literally because it's an internal. Because if I know what we're doing, if I had a magic thing that told me, like, we do these things and this works, then like, planning is way easier because the plan just says, like, go, go do more of this thing. But it's. It's never like that. But I think, like, lost in the, you know, LinkedInification, and I'm a part of this, no doubt, but like, lost in the LinkedInification of, like, B2B, marketing is like, you gotta. It's never just marketing. It's like when I think of, like, early days of Drift, when we were really humming, it was like, the founders had this strong vision of, like, here are the goals. Here's how we want to do marketing at this company. We don't want to do it this way, we want to do it this way. Other than that, Dave, you own how we're going to get there. But they had a very strong vision for what marketing should do and how we're going to measure marketing. And they had benchmarks and ideas from other companies. We want to focus mainly on these two channels. The product motion is going to be this, and here's what we want marketing to do. Then 90% of the questions that I get asked on these types of webinars go away because it's like, we're not focusing on that. I have a very clear goal. I had a very clear goal at Drift in year one. It was this many new trialers. We weren't focused on monetization. We weren't Focused on revenue is like, we need to prove this out. So we have monthly trialer, new trial, little free signup goals. Great. That was the most aligned that we've ever been because that was the earliest stage in the company when things are simpler. As you get bigger and you have more teams and more people and more competing priorities and people fighting over budget, that's when it gets more complicated. So I'm just like saying that to like, just take a deep breath, take a step back, think about how much of your job is spent battling these internal things and like, maybe you can be the one to like, push the team to be like, look, I'm gonna get my company bone. I'm gonna get my bonus if the company hits our goals. So, like, why don't we figure out how to get our shit together and all work together as one team, which you can then find out later. Toxic company, you have all different execs with all different bonuses based on all different goals. And so that's where things also go haywire. And so, like, it really just does all come back to, like, founders setting the right goals and the right priorities for the company. And, like, smartly at companies I've been at, the founders have been like, everyone on the management team is getting a. Your bonus is based on company revenue and company churn goals. Figure it out together. You all are experts in different areas. Dave, you're the marketing person. Tara, you run the channel. You're the partner person. Use your superpowers to, like, help us hit this goal together. That's how it has to work. Otherwise, like, we could do these webinars for weeks and years and months. And that's why they exist in B2B marketing, because it's internal BS that is unnecessary and it's from when you're not aligned.

For sure. It's such a good call out. Like, going back to the first question that we talked about, which was aligning to revenue. If you're not, then you have a really hard time saying, like, okay, but if I take a month of my time and really help sales close more, have a higher acv, whatever it is, and get to a revenue goal, that could have a huge impact. But if you're not aligned to revenue, if you just need to generate MQLs or whatever the hell, like, you're not going to be able to do that. You're not going to be able to even have the conversation with sales or you won't want to.

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Do. Because you're gold on something that is irrelevant to helping those functions. Right.

And by the way, every CEO that I know, which is not all of them, a couple of them, they don't care how you do it.

Right?

Like, yeah, we're going our own heads about, like, well, we got a blog and we got CEO doesn't care. If you said, you know, we're going to stop all blogging and emailing and social media and we're going to do this 100% outbound thing and we're going to crush our number this year. The CEO is going to be like, she's going to say, great, please go do that. And she's going to tell the board, hey, we smashed our goals. And the board's not going to say, well, where's your blog? They're going to say like, awesome job hitting your number. How do we grow this thing again? And then you come up with new channels. So, like, don't get married to, like, these things that you have to do or have to have. Your job as the marketing leader is to figure out how you're going to achieve this goal. And like, you can do that through agencies or people or technology or programs or whatever, but you don't have to do anything.

Yeah, that's. I couldn't agree more. I mean, it's rare because a lot of times you, you know, you want to bring the executive level sponsorship, you want to get the CMO talking to their cmo, especially in our marketing world. But, like, there's nothing more satisfying when me and my team can close a deal and we didn't have to get any of the execs involved and we just hit it like, yeah, we closed this deal. It's a good deal. They're like, thank you. You didn't have to get me involved. I can go do something else. It's so satisfying.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. All right, let's keep flipping through. Quick hit. How often should sales and marketing teams meet anyone?

I feel like it's one of those, it depends questions. But yeah, if you can't remember the last time you met, that's probably not a great sign.

Yeah, I mean, I think daily I'm constantly talking to my counterpart on the other side. We have a really good rapport. And that's, I think it's so crucial if you don't have a good rapport, if you don't trust each other, if you're not aligned to the same goals, don't even meet, don't even talk to each other. Right. You, you have to have that strong rapport and that's where it just comes down to also really good hiring. Right. You have to have someone that believes in whether it be ABM or demand gen process, whatever, but you have to have a good rapport. And I go to like, we slack. We talk every day with my counterpart.

Yeah, I think that's the perfect answer. Ideally you're talking every day and you're having open communication so you don't get in this cycle of like we only talk when we meet and when we meet I drop a bomb. Like that's, that's.

That.

That never works. But like I had a relationship with like Armin who was the VP of sales at Drift when I was there. And I love him to death, but like he annoyed the hell out of me because of how much we were talking. And it was, it was great because I had a great team and so Armin and I were able to talk at that level and he'd like send me a contact record in Salesforce or he'd be like, listen to this call. And like you need to have time to be able to do that and talk at that level versus in the. And so we would be talking daily. Also. The executive team was very close. And so it wasn't just sales and marketing, it was sales and marketing and product and cs. We actually all were talking every single day. And so I think it's also important to have like, yes, the rapport. You got to have that 100%. That's ingredient number one. I think another thing might be like outside of the meeting is like what are your systems and how are you proactively and transparently communicating goals and updates and what you're working on? Because you don't always have to have a meeting to do that. But like is there a daily automated email that goes out that shows, you know, new, you know, new sales qualified leads or new opportunities or new pipeline and meetings held? Is there some type of like first come up with before you figure out how you're. When you're going to meet? Like first come up with an operating system together? What are our goals? How are we going to communicate progress towards those goals? Could it be something that we share in Slack? Like is there a zap we can create that's always sharing new deals or new updates? And then like can we you what do you want to use that meeting time for? And so it's not just like this, like go through the motions meeting. Like how do we actually use that meeting to be productive? And so I think it's important to think about like all the tools that you have, from video to Slack to email to Rapport to the meeting. Before you think about how often you should meet, what do you want to meet about and what is the goal of that meeting. And I also have found that like a lot of times I don't know if Matt will disagree, will disagree with this, but like that meeting tends to be like very one way or the other. It's like either sales is getting beat up or marketing is getting beat up. And that typically happens when there's not some type of shared scorecard of like, what are we doing together? We are sales and marketing and together we own X goal. And so each week we're going to meet to each share how we're both contributing towards that. And so I think you need to again comes back to the beginning of having clear, clear goals and clear metrics and then sure, have a, have a weekly meeting, have a daily stand up if you want to have it. But what's the point of that? Is it to make progress on things? Like in the early days of drift we met every day, but that was because I was only. There was only one marketing person, me and five salespeople. And at the end of every day we'd be like, what call, Tara, what was your call like today? Ah, that call sucks. Sorry about that. Okay, we could tweak that. So a lot of that stuff matters too, like the stage that you're at.

Yeah, that's a great point. On tools, we have like a billion zaps in our slack, but there isn't always a need to meet to talk this stuff out. I feel like often when we meet it is just to catch up, which is kind of the best scenario that you can be in because everybody knows how things are going because of those tools.

One of the best things that we have is really just like a shit meeting with sales that we do every two weeks. And that's all it is. We have topics and people want to talk about stuff and whatever, but honestly we hang out for like 30, 45 minutes and just talk about whatever's on our mind. And it's not like here's the agenda and here's the metrics we're going to review and here's blah, blah, blah. It's just actually a conversation about what's going well and what's going wrong and really what we should be doing.

It's tricky. We face it. Sometimes we get some C level egos right and sometimes they're looking for other things and just there's always History. And so we have our extended exec meeting tomorrow and we all got our core group together, so we're all aligned on the metrics we're going to present. Another thing is like we're going to shout each other out to the fences. Come on. Like, we hit the quarter. That's great. But like, it wasn't just sales, it was abm. It was our partnered team. And when everyone else is calling out everything else everyone's doing and making that point makes it so smooth and kind of lets those CEO, cfo, whatever personalities get pushed to the side.

I have a question for Tara, actually, if you don't mind me asking. Can you talk about those apps and some of the, like the tools that you use outside of meetings that are helpful to like keep everybody in the know?

Yeah. So one of the. Well, there's a couple channels. I had to mute them because we have so many, but there's one that brings in his app literally every time someone comes in. New inbound lead. And we have another one on inbound meetings. We have external meetings too, so we can see what meetings the outbound SDR team is booking and we can kind of cheer each other on there. So it's really cool to see that SDRs and the A's in our inbound meetings channel. Being really excited about the type of account and companies that are coming in.

I love that because you can also see like when you set it up, you can see where you can see like the source, you can see the activities. And so it gives like the team some like, oh, hey, that, that campaign that's running right now, we just booked a meeting from it. Like it's like small momentum wins like that I think are awesome for Slack and zapier type stuff, right?

Yeah, exactly. So earlier this week we sponsored a newsletter. So I put that in our updates channel. Obviously that's manual. I'm putting in a screenshot. But then the team can go through those channels and see the results of that pretty much in real time. Which is really cool.

If you do something similar with, with new ops opening and then like me, myself, I'll go in and tag like whoever's running the event or whoever, you know, sponsored the newsletter, whatever it is, and doing the little marketing, congratulations too. Not just out, you know, outside of sales, which is fun, that's fine.

And I would say another thing for your managers on make sure you're paying your CEO, your cfo, your CRO to also send a Slack or just an individual one off to that ic because it Means a lot.

Right?

Like, the fact that they're in Washington. It doesn't have to happen all the time, but they're busy. They're working on funding or whatever. But just a quick text from the CFO being like, hey, Tim, killer deal that life score. Like, oh, my gosh, it goes so far.

Yeah. Having execs that are active in Slack, like, outside of their own workings, that helps a lot. That's great.

Yeah. Sometimes even an emoji reaction from them, you're like, oh, they saw it. Cool. That's all you need to know. Just so that they see it.

Yeah. As, like a low marketer. That's amazing. Love it. Thank you. I did good work. Finally, I got noticed. Love it. All right, keep it on the same train. What's the best way to deliver feedback between sales and marketing? Yeah, I guess, like, usually mine's one on one, mostly with, you know, sales leaders, sometimes in some public settings or. Or with sort of the entire management team. But I'm curious what y' all are doing or if you have any opinions.

I don't really have, like, negative or constructive feedback for sales too often, but I think this applies in general, that when it's negative, you should do it one on one. And when it's praise, do it as publicly as you can. So just like we were saying over slack.

Pretty simple. Yeah.

I think if you have the lines open that we talked about earlier, it just becomes. It doesn't become like, oh, my God, I gotta tell me. It only becomes like, Tara's gonna kill, like, if we don't have a relationship and I gotta give you hard feedback that's gonna be worse than, like, if Tara and I are tight, then I can tell her, like, hey, you have some broccoli in your teeth and she's not going to be like this, you know, like, it's. It's so much about that. But I also think that's why having those, like, the relationship is important, but having those systems also, like, have it in public in that sales and marketing meeting. I think. I think a lot of times, like, conversations happen between two people on Slack or privately, when actually they would do more good if, like, we had them in that meeting setting. It's like, matt, I'm not coming after you. I'm not. I might tell you. I'm gonna give you a heads up. Like, Matt, in this meeting today, I want to talk about X.

All right?

And then let's have that discussion with the team. Because I. I've made the mistake of, like, you're trying to solve hard problems with multiple people. Like use these smart people to your advantage on each team. Like I've gotten great marketing ideas from the sales team and the marketing team has given great ideas to the sales. So you have to have that open forum for feedback. And so I, I would have some type of like the sales and marketing meeting is, has some type of structure. Like we review X metrics and X goals, but we spend the last 10 minutes or last 15 minutes. That's an open Q and A. And people submit things, submit bullets that we need to talk about. Boom. This salesforce report sucks. Okay, great. Let's talk about it. This deck, we need a new deck for this. That sucks. Let's like have build that in. And so then it like when you give it more structure, people take it less, less personally. But I also think it's a lot about the culture and the culture of communication inside of your company. And so if you have a, if you have a culture where people communicate directly but respectfully like you, you know, just because you're going to give direct feedback doesn't mean you have to be an asshole about it. But also you have to be an adult and a grown up at work and be able to like take feedback and not take everything so personally. There's right and wrong ways to deliver all that. But I think to have a culture where you're able to like challenge things and challenge each other is very important. It's impossible to get anything done if you're constantly worried about how me giving this feedback about this thing that sales is doing is going to send the, the sales leader into a tizzy is like, you're never gonna be successful that way.

Love it. Matt, any, any feedback?

Same thing for me. Same thing for me, by the way. Like I've, I've like you mature as you, as you work and, and you learn and yeah, I'm sure the 28 year old version of me was impossible to give feedback to and I would take everything personally. Right. And so I think you have to understand that that's normal for everybody.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's a good call out.

Yeah. I was thinking, I try if it's like, if someone does something like an IC on marketing, I will ping them on slack and be like, hey, I'll first praise and then I'll give a little feedback. But if I see it as like a trend, then I usually go to the leader or my counterpart and I won't call people out specifically but like, hey, here's a trend. I'm seeing. I think we should look at it this way. What do you think? So I never want to go to my counterpart, another manager and like specifically call out people on their team because that's not fair. But I also think like if you have a good flat org, ICs can give managers feedback and vice versa. Like someone on my team wanted to give our SDR manager who's on marketing some feedback and I said yeah, go for it. He's like, well why don't you do it? I'm like, you have the feedback, you can give the feedback, you know, and as long as you did and this person I trusted to do it as long as you do it in a professional manner. But you don't always have to go through all the lines of communication. It's just takes too long.

Yeah, the up and around communication is such a pain.

Honestly Colin, what do you think?

Yeah, I think I'm the same as you Matt. Like if I see it as a one off, I'll ping. If it's an ic like a BDR SCR or someone, I'll ping them like hey, I noticed this. I don't know what it is but just so you know. But if it's a trend then I go to the manager or the director or whoever it is that I think is the best fit. Direct feedback or feedback about like a process or stuff that we're doing that everyone's contributing to. I'll bring that to meetings for sure. Like we have, we have two kind of core meetings that we do with sales. One is that shoot the shit version which is just like a chat it out and then one is the sort of like numbers. Let's look at how we're performing. What do we need to accomplish? What do we need to do? And that's really more with the BDR SDR team for us. And that's where I'll bring some of that. Like this process seems like it could use some love or maybe we should update it. Maybe it could be better. Here's some thoughts I had curious what you think. Whatever. And maybe they'll come back and say like no, it's this way because xyz whatever doesn't matter. But yeah, I think it truly depends on the type of of feedback. This is just about sales and marketing alignment. I feel like we've talked about that literally for a half an hour. Almost everything is, is about is it the topic?

Like isn't that what we're talking about?

Yeah, yeah. But also like anything that yeah marketing can do just to help sales out too. How we, we're sellers in some. Right. But I'm curious, any other quick hits?

I think one, I think one thing on that is like to find like outside of the plan and the strategy and the goals and the tactics. Like, like it's like a new friend or a relationship that you're in. Like the more you can go out of your way early on to help each other out, I think really goes a long way for things that don't show up in the report. Like I hopped on a sales call and helped X person close a deal. I made a one off slide for one sales rep who asked something. I hooked Matt up at 8 o' clock on a Tuesday night with an image that he needed. Like you don't have to do it all the time but like I think reciprocity matters. And I'm not saying do it in a like a, a skeezy kind of way where it's a game, but like it's just like a relationship. Like when you go out of your way for each other, you're gonna be like, that was awesome. Tara didn't have to do that. I'm gonna now do the same thing. And so I think finding little opportunities like that that don't show up in the reporting or aren't like on your like today's to do list. Find time for those like same way you might like do like surprise and delight stuff for customers. Like how can you do that within the sales and marketing teams to show each other that like, yeah, we got your back. This is a team effort and I'm going to help you even if it's not in my like list of priorities for this week that I'm working on per se.

Yeah, I feel like it's almost like what people say. You should network before you need a job. The last thing you want is to be that person that goes to sales. Like when, anytime you need something or when something is broken or something's wrong, you want them to already know who you are and have like good report with you first.

Yeah, I was going to say, you know, we've all been in martech. I think Matt, Tara myself currently they're curious for Tara Dave, how often you got on the phone with sales or you took like initial calls with friendlies or people who reached out to you. And then Matt for you, like do you invite your marketing team on?

Sometimes it has to depend on the relationship. Like I think the relationships trump everything. And so if it can help break the ice because it's Kind of all awkward talking to new people. You're kind of sizing up feeling about what kind of person you are, how engaged you are. So I usually will. If the relationship came from marketing, yes.

Yeah, I actually don't think I've been invited on too many sales calls. I've been asked for intros to people that I'm connected with and obviously happy to do that. But I do think that's something that sales could do more is just throwing the invite out there. Maybe you're marketing a team. Maybe I just had a half hour open up my calendar and I can jump on. So yeah, people should do it more.

I think it depends on the product and the why. Like at Drift we were making marketing software and I was the marketing leader at the company using our own product. And so we use that to our advantage. Where like there was a time where like the marketing team, like I knew the product really well and then as the team evolved, others knew it really well. And so like there was a huge value like in oh yeah, do you want to have Sarah hop on a call? Like she's a huge asset because she knows the product really well and so like she can show Tara like two things that she might not be thinking about. Whereas like if it's just a kind of schmoozing like, you know, if I was selling like cyber security or something that I didn't really like know, then maybe not. And I think you can achieve the same thing by like listening to gong calls and being really close to the conversations that are happening. Yeah, I think sometimes we mistake like having to be on a sales call versus like actually just being plugged into what those conversations are or those are two different things.

Yeah. I find because we sell like across the entire marketing function and into sales too, I'll get asked like, hey, you know, this person's interested in how we do lead routing and how we work with the SDR team. Like you willing to hop on a call and just chat about how we do it or what have you sort of like a one on one education or conversation. I do that quite often. The sales stuff, rarely. You know, maybe if we have like a really technical prospect who wants to talk like nitty nitty gritty about some metrics or something like that in advertising or something, we'll hop on there or support where we can. Especially we're still spinning up like a consultative type team internally. So that's sort of where we helped out in the past, the technical pieces where you can't expect a salesperson to know how to engineer a website or fully run an ad platform. Right? Yeah. Cool. This is an interesting one for you, Matt. What do you actually care about? What can we create? What materials, documentation? What do you actually want? Because it feels like sometimes you create it and it's into the void.

Yeah. I mean, this is a selfish thing. Like, I personally, I love seeing content. Right. I think I want to see case studies, webinars, events. I'm from Missouri, so I'm from the Show Me State. Like, I want to. I actually sometimes probably don't care more about the metrics. I just want to see things being done, which is probably should also focus more on the metrics and. But like that's, I think for me one thing is like, I want to know, like, what are we doing? Like, what's coming up? Like, what can I get excited about? What can the team get excited about? What events? Like, and because I do look at it, my team hates me for this. But when we do develop a really strong piece of content, I read it, I make questions and quizzes and then I send it to my enablement person and have them load it into saleshood and then make them take a quiz on it. So I'm very much like, I want to see content, I want to see thought leadership. You know, all of us are very crowded space and there's a lot of like, what does this do? Is that a feature? Is that a strategy? Do I need to buy this? Do I need to buy that? And so like, I'm always pushing my team to be forward thinking so we can be kind of the leading edge of our space. I don't know, I'd be curious to think like, you're my worst nightmare.

That made me nervous. No, but it's cool that you're using it so much.

That's awesome. Yeah, like, man, creating quizzes on content and then getting your reps to do it. That's awesome. Yeah. At least you know that they are looking at it and reading it and ingesting it. Right. And like then maybe able to use it in a better manner. That's awesome.

From a marketing perspective, they hate me for it too, because these are like enterprise sellers.

Like, what?

What are you making me do this for? I'm like, you need to read. It's good stuff.

One thing that we started producing that's a total opposite end of that is we've actually been going through Gong recordings and pulling out just snippets from calls of a customer. Getting super excited about something. Always, like different context but we found that the sales team really loves using those just to throw it into their email cadences when they're trying to get someone's attention. Instead of sending them like a lengthy customer story, it's literally 10, 15 second video for them to just listen to and hear what a customer is doing. With us, usually it's something around like some innovative way they're using the product.

Yeah, I love that. Doing the again, sort of like the internal cheerleading for how awesome the product is or how much the customers love it. It's huge. Like that's a huge morale boost internally too.

Also think like, how can you make things that are equally as consumable to potential customers as the sales team? And so like if it's that good of a PDF, like why is that not on your website? And then just like people are sharing a link to that and so like look for opportunities. And so the more that you're like sales enablement content is actually your public facing marketing content, the better. Obviously there's certain things that you need to train the team on or like have internal notes of competition and pricing and strategy that you're not going to put publicly. But I think the more you can demo off of the website or like I like the content idea because like when the sales team is actually using the content that marketing is creating, that's how you know. That's usually like when I've had a good indication that like this is going to land with customers. When the sales team is excited about like I'm excited about sending this to someone is like not always the case. And that could be a podcast episode, a video, an article. I like to look for like indicators like that.

Yeah, that's a good call out. Rely on the salesperson, the sales team as like a one off or a gut check I guess on content quality or if it's going to land. I mean they're so close with the customer.

If that's your mo. If your sales motion is, if your motion is like, I gotta talk to somebody to close this deal. Like, why would you not lean on them? Hey Matt, you're literally having these conversations. What are the magic things that you wish you had that would help you close more of these deals? Like, doesn't mean I have to go and do everything that you say. But like why would you, why would you not listen to him? And this is the person who's trying to close this. My job is to give you some WD40 to like help this deal close. Like I gotta listen to what you Need.

Yeah, but we also have to be understanding of like, you know, it's not always easy to get case studies and coordinating all these people and to get quotes approved and to get someone to do a video. And so that's where I like, I don't ever want to get like so involved. Like we have to have this specific thing to close more deals or it has to be a webinar on this vertical or else we're not closing any more deals. But like, because so for me it's more like I just want to see things being done. When it can be specific things, it's great. But like, I'm also understanding of like, you guys have your other priorities. It's so hard sometimes to pull these things together. Design, creative, brand has to approve. Like I empathize for what you guys have to do sometimes because it's like managing so many projects just to get a piece of collateral done.

I do think on that point though, there's a lot marketing can learn from sales because they're so scrappy. If they think of a funny meme and throw it up on their LinkedIn, they, the sales reps will just do it. But marketing is very like, oh, it has to be prettier, it needs to be polished. We need approval for this quote. So I think we're trying to, we're trying to lean into that a little bit more with things like those Gong recordings. So we didn't have.

It's so true. I've had that where like the marketing team is like, we think we're creating all these things, we think sales is using them. And you're like, go look at the two emails that sales is actually sending out.

It's going to be like a hand drawn meme that's like, but people like it, so it'll work. If it doesn't work, they'll stop using it and they'll come to you for something else.

But that's.

Yeah, that's a good point too. If you're getting a ton of requests, like, maybe there's an issue. Maybe you should take stock of what's happening because if sales doesn't have what they need, they're going to ask. There's a question in chat about how to change, repair, transform a relationship between sales and marketing, where it feels like sales is taking a lot but they're not willing to give over. Like, hey, here's a call that went really well. Maybe we should reach out to them. I'm curious. Maybe, Matt, since you're probably on the other side of like, shit, I'm busy trying to close deals. Yeah. If you have anything to add.

Yeah. Is that the question from Adam?

Adam?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean we do sometimes take resources, I would say a lot of times, like especially legal resources, like marketing, a lot of times wants to try to get bring on a new vendor or something and we're like, no, no, no, you have to do our contracts before you even do theirs. And yeah, the design, like especially with deck building, we definitely have some people, you know, once. Oh my God, I'm almost scared when the market, when the salesperson figures out who the designer is and they make a take a deck and make it really pretty, your world is just going to change forever because they're going to come to you for everything. So, you know, this is where, you know, again it goes back to a data talk. You have to have like alignment from the leaders that like what is the goal? But if the goal is to close more deals and they really, everyone is aligned that, that having that pretty deck they think is going to do it, it's kind of a tough one to get around because everyone wants to close more revenue. But at the same time, like when is it a special ask versus like one is it a process? And again, I don't have the best answer, but it really goes back to like getting your leaders aligned on who does what. And now Adam's typing, so I'm nervous what he's going to say.

I would double, I would double click on Adam and say it sounds like you have some more toxic stuff happening inside of the company. It's not just on the surface of like they don't give me anything. Well, like why don't you have access to sales calls? Like aren't they recorded?

Yeah, it sounds like they're gatekeeping the customers or the. Exactly like they're scared of letting you talk to them, which.

I don't, I don't need. I don't need sales's permission to figure out case studies, insights and thought leadership because I know what's happening on sales calls and I know what customers are, what questions are coming up. So there might be something deeper.

Yeah, I just call it like go by gong, I guess because then you can self service. It sucks. Sometimes the relationship is hard, but if you're in that position, try and figure it out yourself.

Yeah.

Also think you have to be careful into getting into like the one off. Like Matt joked about it. But like you have to be careful in getting into the one off. Like sales rep sending your designer things Like, I run the marketing team. We got lots of other things that we're doing. You need to. That needs to funnel through us. That needs to funnel through us. And I'm happy to, like, help support that in some way. But, like, let's. This is something that I would be talking about at the sales and marketing meeting. I'd be going to the sales room and say, look, I can't have this person just hitting up my designer directly. Is there. Is there a deck need? Am I hearing that there's a deck need that we have? Because, like, we've just did six decks over the last eight months for you all, and we're still not using it. So let's have that, like, back to what we talked about the beginning. It's always, like, peeling back all those layers and saying, like, what's the actual issue? Oh, the actual issue is that they think the deck is and so they're not using it. And so we need to make a new deck. It's not about this deck and this one off thing. It's like, always something deeper that. That, like, that.

Good call outs. All right, I'm gonna go to another one that's, I think, gonna be kind of like a hot take question. How much or how should marking teams contribute to Cold Outbound? I guess maybe we'll start off with, like, where does Cold Outbound live? Should it happen? Any takes?

Yeah, it should. I should definitely happen. It's not wrong or bad. It's like, should cold, like, at a very. In the very simplest form, you can answer it as, like, well, if you think it shouldn't happen, then that means that you think that everyone's just going to magically show up in your store and buy. And so, no, if I built a good product and there's a strong need for it in this market, then, like, I'm gonna go and tell you about it, and I want you to come to us. And so I think marketing can support sales in that, which is, like, what does it take for Matt to go reach out cold to one of our top customers, to a dream account? He's got nothing. We got no videos. We have no case studies. We have no decks. So, like, marketing is going to contribute because they're going to give him the goods. That's going to make a better outreach. But then also in, like, the highest level, do you think Cold Outbound is easier when people have heard of the company or have never heard of the company? And so in, like, in the greater sense, like, marketing contributes to Cold Outbound where if like is cold outbound going to be easier for Shopify or for some new e commerce startup that you've never heard of, it's going to be much easier for Shopify. So I think marketing also contributes to overall like awareness and how many people know this company. And then the other part is like the sales enablement. What am I arming Matt with to actually go out to start these conversations?

Yeah, I think if you have a pretty narrowly defined ICP like we do, it's part of our job to make sure as many people as possible just know roughly what we do. They might not know our exact sales pitch, but they know Chili Hyper, they know roughly what we do. So that when you do reach out to them and get their attention, it's. It should be that much easier to get them on the phone.

Do you all have a way of measuring that, by the way? Just do you mention it? Like, is that, is that a metric that you're focused on or is it more of just a feeling type thing?

It's more of a feeling. I'm working on figuring out some kind of metric for it, but we're basically broadly targeting people that we know could work with us. And I don't have a total number.

But yeah, the metric's really hard. Honestly. We look at ICP fit companies that visit our website. Of course we. Clearba has the tech to do that, so that's how we start it.

So you like, of the universe of customers that you can sell to, you can look at a number. Like what would that measure be? Is it a percentage? Is it a. Like, what is it actually? That's.

Yeah, we've done it. We've done it in a couple ways. Like sometimes it's just traffic that we're looking at. Is it going up, what's happening there? But then we've also done it in like percent engaged. Right. We have sort of, we've had our view of who do we actually want to sell to, like all the possible accounts, 20,000 or whatever it is. And then we're looking at over the last quarter how many of those have actually engaged with us in some form. It could be a visit to the site if we can identify them. It could be a form fill. It could be, you know, attendance at some event that we've been at, whatever it is. But you're kind of monitoring that they had an action. This account had an action.

Oh, cool.

So it's like, it's like, it's like be like coverage. Like if this is. These are the 10,000 companies we want to sell to. In June, only 2,000 of those 10,000 companies came to our website. You could get something like that.

Yep. Yeah.

Well, to grow that every month or how do you set the goals?

Yeah, we. We haven't been really good at the goals on it. Like, we've been monitoring and measuring and sort of looking at it. We haven't really figured out the goal piece to it directly. Right. I think we. We should and we need to. I also feel like we started out with maybe a little bit too broad. Like, it was just a little too many accounts. We sort of need to narrow it down to a smaller number. You know, like measuring, say like 20, 25,000 or whatever. Okay. 500 new accounts came in the past month. Well, that percentage is just gonna. It's not a lot of change. Right. So. Okay. 2.3 versus 2.4. Doesn't matter. Right. Cool. I think that's a great answer, I guess. Matt, for you, AE's doing cold outbound. Any.

Yeah, I mean, any asks? I always look at, like, we have a hunter farmer model, and for the hunters, you know, you own prospecting. Like, I even position, like, what the SDRs do is gravy. Like, your job is to break into the account. Yeah. Inbound is going to help and you're going to get SDR support and especially marketing. Like, when I think about this is our ABM team who's just outstanding, organized. But I don't, like, get so involved in the programs. And some AES are better than others. They look at this like, oh, Gabe can help me do like, you know, maybe a mailer or, you know, we can actually do an event in an area where my target account is or target accounts. And so I really kind of like stepped back out of it. And then, you know, sometimes I get the reps. Like, well, marketing's helping Bob with this and this. And then why it was like, well, Bob took the initiative. And I love that.

Those are my favorite types of people to work with. And that's when I feel most aligned to sales is like when the sales counterpart, whether it's a rep or VP or whoever, has like, here's an idea. Like, I have an idea. Like, you're the one talking to customers all day. You know what's working, you know what's not, you know what, where the conversations come from. I love that stuff. Like, hey, we should do an event. Like, we have this heavy customers in this area. We should do an event. Awesome. And what do you think the content should be? Well, you know how we did, like, working together like that. That is where the magic happens of this. And so I. I love that example, Matt. Like, and how you can. That's a perfect example of how you should be able to push each other. And I think when the relationship is toxic, the marketing person's like, you know what, Matt? Let me worry about the event. Let me worry about the events. We're like, when it's a good relationship, I'm like, shoot, that would be a great idea. Let's see how we can test that. And then, by the way, when you go and do that, and then the sales team sees you do that, and then it works, then it's like, you know what? I kind of like marketing. I kind of like. Like, you know, we're in this together. I think that's a very important piece of this. Yeah, I love that call out. Yeah.

It's a mindset of always going to the meeting, and it's like, okay, how can I help this person to help me? Like, if you go in this mindset, like, what? And, like, some people just have this mindset, they're like, okay, like, you know, they're like, how I'm gonna have all these people do stuff for me, and I'm not gonna have to do anything. And there are just people like that. Like, they're all thinking, like, how these people can help me. But, like, I really try to coach my team. Like, you've got to go into the mindset of, like, the more I can help Gabe, the more she's going to help me. Like, yeah, you've got to get the people, and you've got to figure out their email address and maybe even help find the space where we do it. But, like, if you do those little things, Gabe's going to even be more inclined to help you because she likes working with you. Like, it's. And then I just. I tell other people, I'm like, you're not helping. To help you, they're helping.

Love it. All right, we're at Time. It was a really easy hour, y'. All. Great conversation. Yeah. Thanks for joining in. It was great. Love it. Appreciate you all. Thanks. Cool.

Thanks, Colin.

Yeah. See you, Sarah. See you, Matt. See you, Colin.

Bye, everyone.

Bye.

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Whether you're deep in your career and.

Want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unique unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2nd half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's going to be here. But let's be real, most teams are still guessing when it comes to what's actually working in marketing, which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again or not, and what's just noise, what's actually contributing to pipeline and what's not. It's Messy. This is B2B marketing and that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramark is a marketing attribution platform that shows you what's working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next dollar. They use marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and regional. And it's built by a marketer made for marketers. And right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year, planning, forecasting and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026. It's not a sales pitch from them, but this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap, and the Paramark team is going to help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can plan smarter right now with the team at Paramark. But you got to grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check them out. Go to paramark.comofficehours that's paramark.comoffice-hours.