Fireside Chat: Sales & Marketing Unfiltered - Scaling Revenue Worldwide

Our next first speakers of the day, James Frampton, Chief Revenue Officer with sugarcim. And Scott Addington, he's the VP of Global Marketing with sugarcm. And today we are going to have a little fireside chat where we talk about sales and marketing unfiltered, how to scale revenue worldwide. And I'm very excited. Thank you, Scott and James for joining us.

What is the, your.

You know, let's start with, with, with James.

We live in a world that has changed very, very rapidly. How would you describe what is happening right now?

Well, so first of all, hello everybody. My name is James Frampton. I'm the CRO here at Sugar CRM. And thank you, Gerhard, for the introduction. I've been with the company coming up to six years in September, and I hear that's a long time in the, in the life of a CRO, But I'm based here in the uk but I do spend half my life in the US.

In terms of what's going on, I think to Stephanie's point around learning.

AI for me personally, and it's something I've been talking about both internally with the company, at our executive level and with my teams, is that you've got to have a growth mindset. You know, I have realized over the last literally month or so how far behind I was in AI, so I've been taking a course myself around how I can get the most out of AI as an individual. But then I'm looking at our business and, you know, where can we use AI to make us more effective and more time efficient? And I think if, if I can be more proficient in how I talk about AI and our company can be more proficient how they use AI, then the third and remaining thing is how can our products use AI and how can we get out to our customers?

Scott, you've been listening to James and his wonderful British accent.

Tell us your, share your perspective and introduce yourself.

Thanks, Gerhard. Yes. Hi everyone. My name is Scott Addington. I too am English and I currently look after global food marketing for Sugar Sugar Serum. And you know, I have to agree.

I have to agree with James. You know, it's, I'm imploring my team.

Not just to be comfortable with AI from a, you know, help me improve my subject line or write me an email or translate this into German or whatever, you know, the real difference and, you know, hopefully we'll get to talk about it later on, but the real difference and the real value that AI can bring us is, you know, building processes. So you, you know, you're getting different AI engines to talk to different AI engines, but also, you know, the, the deep insight that it allows us to, to have on data, on individual prospects on accounts and things like that. So, know, it is transformational, it's revolutionary. And, you know, it's way more than just a spell checker, which I think a lot of people are still, are still in that kind of phase with AI. We got to, we got to, we got to move away from using ChatGPT just to spell check.

So I, I also need something that AI cannot tell me, which is a fun fact about you, Scott and James.

I will let James go first on this one, although I don't think I'll be able to follow his fun facts.

I. So I followed Formula one, and one time I was lucky enough to be at the Monaco Grand Prix and I may have had a couple of drinks in the sunshine. And upon walking past a restaurant, I spotted Roger Moore, famous as James Bond. And as I spotted him saying, there's Roger Moore, I walked full speed into a concrete iron ball and I had flip flops on and I slammed my toe into that and there was blood everywhere. I looked up and there was Roger holding his hand out and he sat me down at his table with his wife and he gave me his gin and tonic and said, I think you need this more than I do. And I sat there for 10 minutes whilst my foot was being attended to. And he was an absolute gent. And he remains my favorite Bond.

Amazing. What a great story.

Yeah, it was fantastic, Scott.

Now you have to top that.

No, I can't.

I can't. I can't compete with that. I can't compete with that. So listen, my, my, it's not a fun fact. You might find it funny, but I, I actually don't. But I've been, I've been working in B2B marketing. I found this out at the beginning of the year, late last year. I've been working in B2B marketing for longer than over half of the population of this entire planet has been alive. And so that makes me feel delightful. But, you know, hopefully I can pass on a couple of insights and things like that onto the audience today from, from that long, long life in maximum.

So that brings me to the next question. With all your experience, what does scaling revenue mean to you, Scott? Beyond speed.

Yeah, beyond speed is the key thing there, Germain, because I think, you know, when we talk about scaling revenue, most people, the focus is normally 100% on, on speed. How fast can we go? How quickly can we get to that next ARR goal. And I think that that kind of thinking misses, it just misses some of the key foundations that we, that we need. Right. So for me, with my marketing hat on, scaling is much more than just speed. We got to look at how we actually put the foundations and the building blocks in place to enable that growth. Right. Whether that's entering new markets with localized messaging, whether that's regional pricing models, whether that's, you know, getting our head around the local laws and the regulations that will actually often dictate how we even talk to prospects and generate leads and pipeline in the first place. Right. And so I guess what, you know, what I'm trying to say there is that there isn't a one size fits all kind of global approach to go to market rates in our case. And I'm sure with many of the people that are on here, you've got direct sales models. You might have partner first models in some geographies or in some industries. Other times it could be hybrid, you know, and from, you know, and I speak from a marketing point of view, we got to think about flexible go to market frameworks, right? Flexible playbooks that translate not just languages and you know, but context. For example, you know.

Germany is a very different market to prospect in and to try and engage customers and prospects than the UK or America, for example. You, you've got to come, you got to come at it in a very, very different way. So that's, you know, whether that's, you know, looking at the GDPR or the, the preference service laws or prospecting laws, anything like that, you've just got to make sure that you've, you've really got a plan in place before you go hell for leather into new, new Geos and try and scale.

Yeah, what you're saying is that you gotta be, go beyond translation, you know, take a deeper dive and look at the culture, the habits, the norms, the exact values and, and every country has its own unique challenges. James, what, what are your thoughts on that topic?

Yeah, I mean I go from a different kind of, off a different kind of tangent. I think if we talk about speed and, and the scale. When I'm thinking about expansion and I've done it, I've learned the hard way. Yeah, you think about where to go, but actually I think it's more about where not to go. That mostly comes down to the tam, you know, the total addressable market. So we may decide that a dollar in this territory is actually worth $2 plus in this other territory. Another example in my previous life when I was in erp, there was a strong European vendor who decided they wanted to be number one or number two in any given country that they operated in. And if, if they could not do that, then they would not step into that region. So in this instance they decided to keep away from the three largest markets in Europe, uk, France and Germany, and focus on the Nordics, the Baltics and parts of Eastern Europe until they had that mass, that critical mass in those territories. And literally, I think it's 10, 12 years later, only now have they decided to start looking into the UK and Southern Europe. I think the other side of this, I think it's been touched on about the partnership channel. If you choose to go into a new Geo and the partner channel is the route to market and I know many companies out there on this call would probably have a partnership channel, but in essence, I think, you know, if you go, if you choose a channel because to accommodate the culture and the language and some of the things that Scott spoke about, you know, you do need to think about do I sell through channel or do I sell with channel? And the difference with the sal with channel and we've kind of done it here at Sugar, is that we have people set up in region who truly are an extended part of the partner and vice versa and they work in all sides of the business, whether it be new business net, new business growth, customer, customer account management, upsell cross, sale and renewal. And I think the SA with model, whilst on the face of it could be a bit more expensive, it accelerates the bond, the talk tracks because we all start speaking the same language in a different country and the trust is built and I and we've seen the data tells us that the win rates then increase a lot quicker. So that, that would be my. My take on scale versus speed.

It makes a lot of sense. Now let's take the. The paradox and the challenge of aligning sales and marketing globally and still staying relevant on a local level in the regional market. How, how does that work?

I'll take that first.

So I've seen this time and again throughout erp IT Service management and HR talent management and latterly CRM. And I think this is not going to be rocket science. It generally comes down to knowing who you are and what you are and what you want to be. My outlook on the sales org is making sure that we play in areas on top of the previous question around geography. Speed scale is where we have confidence I. E. Customers references a solution which can meet vertical requirements as closely as possible. And especially I think that's pertinent in our current space of CRM because it reduces churn and actually reduces our lead times. So we create, we created an ICP and an ideal customer profile and this is where we meet all those that criteria I spoke about. The tam, the total addressable market is attractive and we can focus our sales and marketing resources on a smaller subset or smaller pond. So yeah, the pond is smaller but hopefully we will be a bigger fish in that pond. However, that doesn't ICP ideal customer profile doesn't mean our only customer profile. We have the concept of RCP related customer profile and this could be a vertical market which shares similar attributes. So you know, don't get caught up on the vertical term. But you know, maybe the company has a small number of customers but focuses their business on really heavy account management to repeat sales. So that could be an attribute which could go across verticals.

And on top of this, you know, in our geographies, if I look at Sugar for example, we have related customer profiles in America where we have been very successful in credit unions. And in our Anz region we see great traction with our aged care sector.

Both by using a professional services template. So this allows our team in region to create ABMs around the RCP which obviously then increases our growth and success but will be enough or never anything that our corporate marketing supports globally because they're very much down into the regions. And then I think the third and final part to that is another three letter acronym on phrase pcp, our partner customer profile. So we have a channel dotted around the world. They may have expertise outside any of our prime verticals we operate in. In our icps they will have content in that, they may have some intellectual property in that. So they're actually more verse to actually providing solution that we will never ever get involved in at a vendor level or support them in channel ways. And again if I take in the Americ, you know we know very little about healthcare, but one of our partners, they focus on healthcare in the U.S. they have, they are HIPAA compliant. So that allows the partner to carve out that niche for themselves in that specific region and it's all incremental to us. So icp, rcp, pcp, that's kind of.

Where we focus aligning the acronyms.

I apologize but it is a tech so we like our acronyms.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Scott, what's your take on that?

Well, you know I'm going to add a couple of more acronyms I think, sorry about that, but.

From my point of view, sales and marketing alignment, from, from a marketing standpoint, it comes down to two things really. And that is marketing needs to be measured on the same thing that sales is measured on, right? And so far too many marketing departments are measured on MQLs, marketing, qualified leads. And not enough measure, not enough focus is on pipeline and marketing generated revenue. And.

So you've got to be aligned because otherwise I can stand here, sit here and go to, go to James. Well, I've generated two and a half thousand MQLs this month. That's my target. It's all done. I'm down the pub. See you later. Meanwhile, the BDRs are trying to follow up and you know, 95 of those leads are just rubbish and me and then the sales guys are starving of opportunities. James is, is pulling his hair out, what's left of it. And, but, but, and so, and, and that's where you get this real kind of friction between sales, marketing. Because on one hand, marketing think we've, we've, we've hit our targets, we've done everything we're all good on, but the rest of the business is struggling. So there's one thing. And then to echo.

James's point, really, you know, we've got to make sure that we play and we're generating pipeline in the right places. So it all comes back to that icp, right, and the RCP to a lesser extent. But from, from my point of view, you know, I make sure that sales and the service teams know that everything that we do proactively from a marketing point of view is laddering up to the, to that icp. Everything we do supports the ICP that has been corporately agreed and filtered down to the whole of the organization. And you know, that avoids random acts of marketing, that avoids, you know, us being reactive to sales or local requests when somebody has a random idea on a Tuesday night down the pub or whatever. So we just, we, we are then working in tandem and working as a, as a, as a group and as a team. And I think those are the. If, if, if marketing can, can, can sort those two out, it goes a long, long way to, to improve sales and marketing alignment. My opinion, thank you.

And I would just add, actually, sorry, on top of that, Gerhard, is that it's very hard to say.

Salespeople are very tactical. So you've got to really drive them to say this is where we're focusing.

Indeed. And, and you know, really what we've got to try and do Globally. And all marketing departments need to try and do this in whatever regions they're they're playing in. You got to try and tell your story in the same way to the same kind of people.

At the same time or roughly at the same time. So you're going to market in a uniform fashion. And if you've got random acts of marketing happening all over the place, you know, as James says at the behest of sales, it's very disjointed, it's very. Yes, we have a nightmare really.

James, can you share a practical CLM use case that led to real revenue growth?

Yeah, actually I can. And, and it may be a little bit off the wall, but I was actually speaking to one of our customers just last week, a gentleman called Matt from Motus, one of the largest DAF trucks dealers in the uk. And it was a story of how he's using our sales eye platform.

So what he was saying to me is the system now allows him to fish for talent in other industries because a good salesperson that made and this is, this is what he uses. Two real examples, salesperson selling gym equipment and vapes.

Can also now sell truck parts when the system provides them with the product knowledge. So and depending on the caliber of that new hire, the time that required to get them up to speed and making money is drastically reduced. And I suggested three weeks as a question mark and he said absolutely, if not faster, they can be out there selling very quickly. And how it's doing that is that the AI will look at the customer and create campaigns specific to that customer. And we kind of focus, we call it the focus gap but effectively it's kind of amplifiers more action by guiding the salesperson towards the accounts they really need to focus on. And that was saying that makes the process infinitely easier for him and his recruitment too, his recruitment team too, because they no longer need to find candidates with industry knowledge that's now not as important. They can simply concentrate on finding a good salesperson. And as part of that he was giving me some details around.

Their business planning and how it drives activity in the platform. And in October last year they are driving the calls and they had a direct correlation in their dashboard to all the orders that were coming in. So they had a quarterly target of 6,000 orders and in October they did 2007, which they their highest month in their history of their business. So kind of getting the salesperson up to speed, quicker onboarding and then actually directing the activity to specific accounts where they may or may not have a Gap, I apologize.

In their portfolio drives the revenue. So, okay, slightly off the wall, but I thought the speed we all. I struggle with as a CRO when I'm looking for new salespeople, how can I get them productive in, in the shortest possible time?

That's a great success story. And I encourage people to head over to Sugar CM to learn a little bit more about your amazing solutions. We gotta wrap it up, but I, I'd love to ask. Scott, you talked earlier about focus and you talked earlier about what markets not to focus on, to say no to. So how. What metrics should sales and marketing leaders stop tracking because they're no longer relevant?

You could just give me a minute while I get my soapbox because I'm going to stand on it for this answer.

So I've mentioned it before, but I think from a B2B marketing point of view, we got to stop, we got to stop worshiping at the altar of the mqr. Right? And, and I see it too, too often, you know, one person downloading a white paper doesn't mean that they're going to buy whatever it is that you're trying to sell. It just doesn't happen anymore. Especially now as we see more and more people involved in the buying groups. Buying groups of 5, 6, 7, 8, maybe even more people across all kind of functions. Right. So we've got to stop being focused on just one person in one organization and we gotta, we gotta change the way that we engage and we've got to move to a more of an account engagement kind of process. All right? And then we're asking ourselves, are the right people from the right companies engaging with us in our content? And I think part of marketing's job is to help sales build those relationships across the whole of that buying group, whether that's the economic buyer, the influencer, or the, you know, the IT guy that is a Microsoft worshipper and is a bit of a blocker to the deal. All right, that's, you know, in 2025, I think that is how deals are going to be won and how progress is going to be made. And so how do we do that? Well, it ain't easy, right? Because the buying, how buyers buy has changed an awful lot over the last 10 years. Five, 10 years with the, the Internet has come on so much that.

You.

Know, these days, 70, 80% of the entire buying journey has completed before, you know, a prospect even gets close to a vendor's website or gets close to speaking to a salesperson. Right. You know, they are, they are on YouTube watching videos, they are listening to podcasts, they are in communities, they're looking at Reddit, they're in Slack channels, you know, they're, they're on newsletters. You, they're list, you know, they're going to events, they're listening to podcasts, whatever it is you, they, they are consuming their information and understanding more about what they want and, and the difficulties and the challenges and how other people have overcome the challenges that they're thinking. They're doing it in a completely different way. And so we as organizations need to be finding out where our buying group hangs out, where do they go for their information, what podcasts are they listening to, what magazines do they read, what ch. YouTube channels do they subscribe to, what influences do they trust, what, what, what communities are they a part of? And we need to be telling our story there. And if we're not, then we're largely invisible. And that causes a problem internally because many, many organizations, you know, it's all about how much pipeline is marketing generated, how much pipeline is sales generated? The channel or bdrs attribution becomes a bit of a distraction because you're trying to stitch together a buying journey that is largely invisible, completely unpredictable. Just to assign credit for a lead. My opinion, I think it's a bit pointless. But hey, we got to stop thinking in silos. We got to, we got to work to get we being marketing BDR sales, we got to work as a unified go to market team, right, that is focused on the end game, focused on revenue, focused on delivering to the prospect and to the customer the information and this. And you know what they need to make a buying decision.

You know, and so yeah, we just got to make buying easier. We got to help buyers to buy. And it's messy, it's difficult, but I think it's important. And I'll get off my soapbox now.