002. Marketing and Sales Alignment

Hello. Hello everyone. Emilio Garcia here on our second episode of Bountiful Live. Hi everyone. How are you? Donald? Good seeing you. Great. And this time I am also streaming. I'm testing this streaming from. I'm streaming from not only Zoom but also from YouTube. So let's see how that works out. And I will start right away. Today we have. Today we have two topics that I want to cover for this session. We are going to explore. Leonardo is there too. Hi, Leo, how are you? Hi again. We are. Today we are exploring a couple of topics and the two of them are going to be sales and marketing alignment. And the second one is going to be the basic components of advertising campaign. How do you identify them and what's important about them? So without further ado, let us start with the first one. So what about marketing and sales? This is a very interesting topic. In general, what I have seen so far in some of the companies, you can run into one of these typical scenarios. One, for example, you have a marketing team. It might be one person that is doing the job, or a larger team, two or three people doing marketing and you have a sales team. Again, it can be just one person or it can be a larger group, two or three sales reps that work on closing on those accounts. So usually what I have seen on B2B, especially more traditional companies, is that the role of marketing is almost solely focused on creating collateral material, on helping to create documents and branding material for the client, but they are not that involved into what sales is doing. And what happens on the other side, very similarly is that sales is very focused on the process of prospecting and closing deals, but it's not really aware of any marketing initiatives happening right now or right away. And that's a typical scenario. It's not that they are enemies, it's just that they usually do not work together. They simply each department do their own stuff and. And those creates interesting things. For example, usually what happens on the sell side is that they don't consider whatever marketing is doing as something that might help them to bring more business or revenue. They usually consider that the contacts that they have on their own and the process that they follow, it's what brings most of their revenue. And if marketing is doing something, they consider that effort as a second priority. It's not the first one. From the marketing side, what happens is either they are really focusing on creating collateral material but not working on understanding what the current prospects want, or if they are doing any effort. They complain about marketing not being aligned with sales in the sense of we are sending leads or we are sending potential opportunities, but marketing but sales is not working on them. It's not providing any follow up on those leads. And that's something that we have find time and time again. And that misalignment create those problems in that sales continuously critique or complaints about the work for marketing because it's bringing unqualified leads or not enough leads or not relevant leads and marketing complaining about not knowing what happens with the leads that they're sending to sales. Right. So. And that's the heart of the misalignment problem that some companies might have. How do I think you solve that on the long run? You have or the company or the organization have to find a common ground on the definition of qualified leads. Because that is pretty much the heart of the problem. And what I mean by that is that what marketing usually calls a marketing qualified lead usually is different from what sales consider is marketing or a sales qualified lead. Some examples might be for, for example, marketing might consider that leads are any person that request a demo or request a conversation with sales through the website or anyone that visit or enters into a webinar or any other kind of event that marketing is working on. And for sales they might have a different view because they might say I don't think those leads are ready for us. Because for starters, I don't know if the contact or the person comes from the right company. The right kind of market that I want to focus on for seconds is even if it's the right company, I don't know if the person that marketing is sending me is the right prospect, might not be the decision maker, it might not have the budget, it might not have the need. Or we simply do not offer the product or service that that person has in mind. So what's missing in between the two areas? It's a qualification criteria. And that's what creates this perception from marketing that sales do not take care of those leads and the perception from sales that marketing is not sending something relevant to them. So one thing that we have recommended for our clients time and time again when they have these dysfunctional teams between marketing and sales is to start up a series of conversations or meetings where they define together what is a qualified lead. And there are two components to that. You have the ideal client profile, which is the type of client that you want to sell. That usually comes from sales. The criteria that usually you want to define on that ideal client profile can be One of the most common ones is the geography where my potential clients are. That's one criteria that sales usually defines based on business goals and business objectives. The second one would be the kind of industries that you want to tackle or work toward. It can be education, can be healthcare, hospitality. It's usually not the whole market. And that's important to define once you have the industry. Usually another criteria that sales layer on top of those is the company size. You might service a small business or you might service large business, and that's important to know too. And beyond that, then you have secondary criteria, because usually size relates to the revenue of the company or how big it is. But second criteria can be related to the type of clients that your potential client has, or the technology that they use, or any particular thing that matters to your product or service. But those kind of like reference points, the placement, the industry, the size of the company, is usually what you will describe as the ideal client profile. Usually, and that's the reason they call it ideal client profile, is because those profiles come from the clients where you have had the most success, where you have been more successful. And that's great for the type of company. But on top of that you have to lay up something called the buyer Persona, which is within that organization. What kind of person is the buyer? It can be more than one. So typically in B2B you have the one role at least that is the person that makes the purchase. But there are many other roles that can influence the purchase. There can be a sponsor or champion that helps the decision maker or that guides them through the buying process. There can be influencers, people, people or persons that might not necessarily make the decision but are going to use the product or service at the end and they have a say on that. So usually, especially on larger companies, there is a kind of committee that you want to influence and that's very relevant to marketing to know. Because when they are doing content, when they are doing advertising, they want to tailor the content that they create to the kind of buyer. So those two big criteria are the ones that have to be aligned between marketing and sales. And they usually do it through a process called defining SQL SLA or service level agreement. And in the sense that you have, you have a definition from sales that marketing collaborate or agree on. And the agreement will be we will only send leads to sales if the leads that we are getting from the website or from any other marketing effort that we are doing match the criteria that we have defined together. Right? It got to be from the right industries, it got to be from the right company size, it has to be from the right kind of buyers and they need to have some, some intent on purchase. So that will be like the, the agreement from the marketing side. But in exchange sales has to make a commitment too which is to follow up on those leads. Those are that marketing consider qualified. And those agreements usually go in the form of time that it will take for the sales team to have a conversation with the lead and also how many times they will try to have those conversations before giving up and sending back the lead to marketing. So those usually are the two criterias. It's not a process that is not a process that starts and ends in one day or one week. It's an ongoing process and evolves over time. But it's usually a good starting point. And what happened over time is that the two teams start to align together towards the business goals of revenue. And I'm so sor. Doug here. And eventually they align themselves and they become more efficient. Right. So I don't know Leo, if you have any comments on that.

Well, probably that. There's always probably a debate between marketing and sales. And as you mentioned, it's a process that companies need to establish. I need to get used to it. Marketing is going to qualify the leads and then sales are going to say hey, I'm not selling because marketing is not sending me the right leads. And marketing is going to say, hey, you're not selling because you are not being able to close the deal. But if the organization can really polish and make this process very smoothly between both organizations, I think there's gonna be a lot of sales for the team, for the company. In those cases where you can send to the salespeople the right leads, then the follow up and probably the statistics. And that's one of the advantage to use this kind of system because you can find exactly what happens with the opportunity since its birth until it's close or death. And in the whole path you can know exactly what's going on with that opportunity. And that post mortem analysis that you can make with this kind of, you know, with this kind of statistics is very useful to the sales, to the marketing people in order to obtain the goal that it's the same for both of organizations, that it's growing the business. That's the same goal for both of us.

Yeah, I completely agree. So I don't know if in this case. Donald, Don, you have, or Donald, you have a question or a comment on that, if you have experienced, you know, some of those phenomenons on your company that there might be some misalignment between you Know what the market wants and what the sales team wants. I know it's a smaller organization, probably there's more alignment but. But it's something to look upon. Right. Is to make sure that all the time to make sure that whatever you are trying to sell to is the same. Is the same crowd that you're marketing to. I think you're mute. There you go.

Can you hear me now?

Yes.

Yeah. The first thing I do on a sales call is always find out what are they doing today or what are they using today. I mean just in our business, like if they're trying to. And you. I think you could help marketing by defining that. Let's say using again in our business a particular type of trash compactor that I know very well. I know the knockoff. So you first find out what they're doing. I don't know how you incorporate that in marketing, but it could be by a product.

What.

What products are or what companies are using such and such a product that you know you are much superior. Your product is superior.

Yes, it. And it's a really tough. It's a really great question because what I have seen, what I have seen on some companies is that there is this lead scoring or lead qualification process in the middle. Obviously probably you don't have it because you do it yourself. Right. But when you have larger organizations, actually that's the role of something that on larger teams evolved into what is called the BDR or the sei, the business developer representative, which is not a closer. It's not someone that close the business. But discover, you know, the particular things that make a prospect a good opportunity for sales and they make those questions. They try to understand the need and if they see potential, then they pass along that lead to a sales rep that usually will do the closing right very well. And that's what I have on that topic today. The other one that I want to cover, unless there's any other topic you want to cover here today is the components of the components of advertising campaign. I like to discuss this topic usually because it helps our clients and prospects to understand how campaigns are made of or what they have in common. So I will use here an example too. But in general, for an advertising campaign you have three big elements. I call them the offer, the audience and the message. And it doesn't matter if you are doing a campaign on search or on social or if it's in a platform like LinkedIn or Facebook, you will always have those three elements. Most people is very aware of the message which usually is the app itself. Right. But they pay less attention to what is the offer and even less to the audience. I will use an example with that to illustrate it with our own company. So I have a campaign that I run just for kind of like demonstration purposes on Google and we have something similar on Facebook. And you can see here what I call the landing page. It's a landing page. It's just a page where you have a form and you express the value of what you want to do. So usually on a campaign, the offer is something like this. It doesn't have to be a landing page. It can be just a website. And usually, for example, sometimes I just send people directly to the website to start talking. But the important thing here is to notice what is that you are actually asking the visitor or the prospect to do. In this case, for example, my offer is let us have a conversation, right? That is what I'm offering here. My time for someone that is interested on discovery, if they want to have a conversation with a marketing agent. In this case for a B2B demand generation agency. For every single company, the offer is going to be different. But usually it's express on a page that has a call to action, right? I'm either going to talk or quote or work on a proposal or understand your need. Or in some cases for B2C, actually I'm going to ask you to purchase something, right? Can be a product or a service that you can purchase right away on the website. So this is the offer portion then.

Can we stop a little bit there, Emilio? Because I found probably I understood wrong the concern of Donald that he was saying that probably in the market he knows his product is the best, but he was asking how to communicate that to the market. So that's probably the main message you are talking about, right? Probably. Which one is that message that Donald is trying to push to the market in order to get leads?

Yes. Oh, that's a great. That's a great question and thank you for helping me clarify that, Leo. But he's right. Is one way that you can express to your audience what are the differentiators or what makes your product difference is through the offer and the message, right? So usually on the offer you express either what are the benefits of what your product do or what sets you apart, what makes you different from the competition. A great place to do that is in the offer and the other way or the other place that you die is on the message itself. And you'll see the difference here. For example, in order for me to show this offer. Let us talk about your needs. I need a message, and that message is the app itself. For example, I will use this one for reference and I will just expand it. This is usually what people will call the ad, right? The ad or the message is what grabs people's attention so they can discover more in the offer. And this is the middle of it, right? In this case, you have some headlines and you have some description, and again, it's trying to convey or to ask for a person to understand better their problems. In this case, usually for our clients, their struggle is growth. They want to grow better, faster, and they want to bring revenue, they want to bring qualified leads. And we know that we can do that through our services, which are related to paid advertising and inbound marketing. But the concern of the client is growth. And that's what we try to explain on Express, on the. On the message or the app. And the three component. The last component of the, of any campaign will be the audience. And it's very interesting that, for example, for search, the way that you define the audience is what they are searching for, right? The keywords that they're using to find you. So you have those three elements there. The audience on search is going to be the keywords that you use for people to find you. The audience on social media is going to be very similar to the concept that we have on our mind, which is where people is, and these ideas about the size of the company and industry and business title or function of the prospect or lead. But. And it's going to be different search. But beyond that, the other two components are pretty much the same. The only difference is that the message on social is going to be more image, video is going to be more visual than on search, where you basically have just text. And usually the offer looks pretty much the same because it's just a page. So these are the three elements that you have for a campaign. And the one thing that I have seen many, many times is that especially when clients are doing these campaigns on their own, they will focus a lot on the message itself, on what you said. But sometimes they will miss the opportunity to really see if they are matching their audience to the right offer. Right. I'm going to put a very different example here. Imagine that you're selling houses of $1 million of value and you have this piece of mail that you're going to send to people or an audience that. That is not in the market for that kind of house, or I will just have even higher number. Imagine $10 million houses on a private island or something like that. Your, your message, your ad can be the best in the world. You can have the best visuals, the best images. But if, if you are sending that piece of mail to people that it has a budget for a house or on the hundreds of thousands and not on the tens of millions, it doesn't matter what your advertising said, they probably not going to even inquire about the offer. Right? So spending time matching your audience to your offer is the most important thing that you have to do on a campaign. Once you have those two elements matched together properly defined, then it's not that the ad is not important. The message, if you have a more enticing one, that will be better, but everything will grow easier for you. Like for example, in our case, we in theory can try to go for people that is looking, I don't know, for example marketing agencies in general or another. Another good example will be people that is looking for help on B2C for example on E commerce, but not for businesses. And we can justify showing up for those saying well, if someone is looking for a marketing agency, we do marketing services so we will have something for them, but that is too broad of a message. It's catering to a very large population. Even if you say just marketing agency or not advertising, but public relationship agency, for example, is completely different from what we do and this is very specific to us. So if you make sure that you understand what is the narrowest that you can go with your audience. If I was selecting people on social media, then I will make sure to know that my company size has to be of a minimum. But it cannot be too large neither because then they have such big marketing teams that they might not need our help. If you work out very, very narrow your audience, then your offer will make sense to them, right? And then you can work on a message that will resonate with them and help them out quite easily. Does that make sense?

Yes, it does make sense.

I don't know Leo, in your experience, if you have had cases where you have seen both the offer is completely misaligned with the audience and cases where they are really aligned together.

Yeah, of course that happens all the time. And that happens specifically when you're starting to understand how the digital marketing works. It does happen all the time. The good news is that you can't make this mistake. And the same tool will help you, the Google Ads will help you that you are being solved successful with this kind of audience. So you should focus on this kind of audience and you are not being successful with the other kind of audience that you probably thought would be successful. So in that case, you would have other opportunities to make this narrowness that you were mentioned, right. To be very clever and really target the right audience in order for you to. You know, sometimes when you're. When you're designing the company, what happens, you say, hey, for example, you were putting an example of if you're selling a mansion of $1 million, a house of $1 million, hey, you need to go to the upper neighborhoods to the people that has these characteristics. But sometimes in your mind, you say, hey, what if there's one possible buyer that lives in these very poor neighborhood? So I want to go there. Oh, yes, it is possible that it's going to be a buyer there, but the probability is less. And you're spending a lot of money to make that bet. It's like a bet, right? You need to go to the more probabilistic bet. That's the way you win. That's the way you make your dollars count. And, you know, it's a very, very common mistake that we all do. And going to your questions, yes, I have seen it all the time. And the good news is that you can make corrections.

You can make corrections that you're mentioning. Remind me of an example that I experienced many, many years ago. We had this client that was selling. It happens that we were starting out. They were selling products for babies. So their audience was pretty much young mothers. Right. And we had a very narrow audience. And the product was specifically designed for infants. It was something that only small children can use. But in the mind of the owner, she said, well, maybe there's a grandmother or. Or grandfather that wants to give this product to their grandchildren. Which makes sense, as you said, is it is possible you might have a child there, but the bulk of the purchases are gonna come from young mothers. They have small children, not from. You know, because if you go by that logic, then you can always say, well, I can go also for a mom that has a teenager because they might have niece. Yes, yes. Or a friend that might be interested. Which is true. That happens.

Right?

There's a little bit of spillover on advertising, but when your budget is limited or when you want to discover faster, if you're going to be successful, you want to start with your target market and then let the market expand upon what you already have and not the other way around.

Right?

Yeah, so, yeah, that. That's it. That's all. The only. Honestly, the two topics that I have for today and I don't know Leo or anybody else if they want to discuss or have questions about something else. If not, we will call it a day.

Well, I'd like to just. When you're targeted, let's say you're making the offer within a company. It depends upon who's going to be your prime audience. The financial guy is going to be concerned with roi, but the guy out on the shop floor is looking to save labor or some kind of resource, right?

Yes. Yes. Hopefully I'm going to answer your question properly. Yes. When you have a smaller budget and especially narrow focus, you might focus on your offer on just one buyer. Honestly, at the end of the day, you have to pick one. But for situations where you have multiple buyers and you have the luxury of running multiple campaigns, one thing that I have seen or we have done is that you create a specific campaign for the buyer that is worried. For example, if you are selling to the person that is going to use the product, they want to know if it's a quality, if it's going to be easy to maintain for and so forth, they're going to experience the product directly. But if you want to have a different campaign just for the person that will be in charge of the numbers, the return on investment, if the risk of the purchase itself, if there's guarantees or all that, you can in theory present them a different page. Right. With a slightly different information that focus on the questions that they have instead of the other one for the maintenance one. So you can do that, you can split test. But usually it's the same, like we were saying, with multiple targets. Even when you might have a client profile where there are many buyers or many buyer Personas, usually there's one that is the most important one for you, right? There's one that is the most important one to you. And the other ones will be in a. They will have the second priority, Right? Yeah. Very well. Well, that's all that I have for, for today and I'll be happy to see you in our next session then.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Have a great afternoon.

You too.

Bye. Bye.

Bye.