Solving sales and marketing alignment issues with Jaleh Rezaei of Mutiny

I was just chatting with my co-hosts about sales and marketing alignment, and I remembered that you just put out this amazing report about sales and marketing alignment. So wanted to bring you on to talk about that and also just talk about your tips about sales and marketing alignment in general. So why don't you introduce yourself, tell us all the things you do, and then we'll dive into the, the topic. The report and how we can solve marketing and sales alignment problems.

Well, this is great because I've always had this dream of us starting our own podcast together, so this is the closest thing. Uh, so I'm Jaleh Rezaei. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Mutiny. Uh, we bring together sales and marketing teams to create truly personalized one-to-one buying experiences.

Give me a brief definition of one-to-one buying experiences?

It starts with the data, right? You need really good data about that account. What are their priorities? What are they trying to do? You can get that from public data sources like their earnings announcements or their press releases or website or whatever it is that they've published on the internet, um, or it's internal knowledge that the sales team has about that company through prior conversations. Explaining, you know, what problems are they facing and then how do you actually help solve those problems. We like to go deeper than that too, of really putting a human face on that experience, making sure that the account executive that knows that account really, really well is front and center on that experience. And so, all these different elements make it human, they make it personal, they make it expert, and that tends to have a huge impact. We've seen in some cases 14x increase in people's likelihood of engaging and interacting with the marketing, which is a pretty significant lift versus, you know, the generic stuff that people do for scalability.

So basically just making more bespoke, personalized, one-to-one experiences for prospects who are in the process, and that helps both marketing and sales and unites both marketing and sales to come together to make these buying experiences. Awesome. Now let's dive into the report. You put out a report. It was beautifully and very fun designed. So many reports I see from B2B SaaS companies are so boring and I'm like, could you have amped it up a little on the design side? And I looked at yours and I didn't think that. I said this was amped up on the design side. It's really fun.

You know, it was the same design agency that created our logo many years ago.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

The report is awesome to look at. Even if the numbers were horrible, I would still tell people to look at it, but the numbers are interesting too. So tell me what report you ran, how you did it, and what it revealed.

Yeah. So, I mean, I'm interested in the topic because obviously it's a huge part of our mission, right? Sales and marketing each do half of the buyer experience. So, if these two teams are siloed, then it's not gonna be a great experience for the buyer and it's ultimately not gonna have a lot of impact for the company. And also, like, as you know, with AI, we've talked about this before, is the lines between sales and marketing is starting to really blur. And so, I think it's just a really interesting time to be thinking about how to retackle this problem, even though sales and marketing have been fighting like cats and dogs for so long. I think there is actually a shift.

Who are the cats and who are the dogs?

Well, oh my gosh, we have this thing at Mutiny where every new hire, they have to tell us if they are a cat person or a dog person. And for whatever reason, early days of Mutiny, it was all cat people. And now we've become a total dog company. And even though I don't have a cat or a dog, I associate with cats. And so, you know, I would say—

You gotta leave this conversation. I have a dog sitting on my lap right now and a dog in my house.

This is how it always goes. Yeah. And I actually have had a dog and I've never had a cat. So, but it's just, you know, it's a connection to the old days.

So here's what I'm gonna say. I think that dogs are the marketers and cats are the salespeople because dogs tend to be like loud and want to talk to everyone and cats kind of want to go like one-on-one with people. So we'll make dog— it's a cats and dogs battle and dogs are the marketers. I also just want to be a dog, not a cat.

I'm gonna reframe our positioning statement to we are turning marketers into cats because we want them to go one-on-one.

There you go. It's time for us all to be cats. We all need to eat that. That's gonna land. That is going to land. And then you have a raccoon logo. It's, yeah, you're going full animal. It's gonna look like a zoo on the website.

Okay. Yeah.

We are, we are digressing all the time. That's cool. What, tell, tell me what, gimme some of the numbers. Tell me what's in there.

So at a high level, right? We, uh, did the survey with 500 sales and marketing leaders in equal parts. So it was a pretty big survey and we dug pretty deep. So 97% said that they believe that working together with the other team is gonna help them hit more revenue targets and that it would be really positive for them, right?

They want to, they want to work together.

They want to work together. In theory.

Okay.

In theory, yes. And also, we saw it in the numbers in the sense that the teams that are aligned are 2.3x more likely to significantly exceed their revenue targets, and the misaligned teams are 2x more likely to miss their targets. So it all adds up that essentially alignment leads to a better buying experience, leads to more revenue for the company, but 82% fantasize about replacing one another.

I love that you use the word fantasize.

Yeah, you can't replace our work. Yeah.

It's hilarious. Okay. So vast majority of people are fantasizing about replacing their counterparts on a regular basis. So everyone wants to blame the other team leader essentially for the problems, or at least thinks that the other team leader might be holding them back. So yeah, that's funny.

Well, and you know, what was interesting is like when you dig a, a layer deeper to see, well, what's the root cause? And, and you know this, everybody always says it's goal alignment, right? Like you don't have the same goals. The problem starts with goals. And of course if you don't have the same goals, yes, that's a huge problem. But I think marketing has done a pretty good job of starting to shift towards pipeline. And that more or less aligns the teams. I think it's good to have a goal that's very connected to revenue, but it's still something that marketing can own. And so, in the survey, we saw 70% felt that they had goal alignment, but still, you know, they are misaligned. And so, the root cause was all around things that I would tie to day-to-day execution and information flowing from one side to the other, or I guess lack of information flowing. So, like, for example, sales doesn't feel like marketing is aware of the conversations that they're having with customers. So, marketing campaigns and messaging is not reflective of what's happening right now with customers. Lack of personalization was a huge theme for the sales side. Another one that kind of stood out to me was 85% of both teams felt that target accounts was a top priority for the company, but only 15% of the sales team. So basically nobody thinks that marketing is doing a really good job with target accounts.

Okay. I was going to stop, stop you on the stat you said before. You said something like part of this is due to personalization. And do you mean that sales wants more help with personalization, doesn't feel like they're getting it, or like marketing is trying to personalize things and doing a bad job? Like, say more there.

I think it's lack of it. So, you know, the world that the sellers live in is very highly personalized, right? Like, you know, you mentioned the cat and dog thing, but it's true. They are, they research every single person they talk to, they customize their pitch. And I think especially the more upmarket you move, the more the sales team expects personalization. And so they're frustrated that they're not getting that. Of course, there's lots of technological barriers to why that hasn't been possible historically. So I don't blame marketers for it, but it is just one of the realities of things that we, that we heard. Um, other things are like lead handoffs.

That's just such a huge one still. Like, I go into— I work with so many companies where I'm like, okay, like, where are your rules of engagement? Or what does your, uh, marketing to sales handoff look like? And they're like, uh, we don't really know. Or like, we don't have that. So, and then you're like, well, how do you know that you're not having gaps in people you're, you know, gaps and leaks because of this, and overlaps and people reaching the same people. And yeah, they're like, ah, just, we don't think it happens in enough volume. I'm like, just make the rules of engagement so easy. Here's a template, I have it for you. Totally.

And the other thing too is like, now that I've spent so many years in product, is like, when you ship a product, you spend so much time iterating it. Whereas in marketing and sales, we ship these huge programs that are the interface between two teams that we've never done before, and then nobody optimizes it. There's no feedback feedback loop. And feedback was a huge theme for both sales and marketing, is they just feel like they don't have avenues to provide feedback to another, to one another. And so I definitely, I would say for lead follow-ups, if you roll out something new and, you know, even if you have really great rules of engagement, just sitting down and saying, okay, like, what's the feedback? Like, you know, now we've had some, you know, have a beta tester group that can look at it and say, was this good? Was this not good? What were the issues? Optimize that, then roll it out to everybody. We see this, you know, with Mutiny as well. Like, one of the things we always recommend to everybody is instead of bringing the entire sales team in to your first campaign, bring, you know, 2 to 5 salespeople that are eager, excited about it. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And iron out the kinks with them because that's how you're going to get adoption. And then those people are your marketers now for the program.

Yeah, I actually use some similar analogies to things that you said. So you were mentioning like we spend all this time on these marketing and sales programs, but then we don't iterate or don't think enough about like, how are we testing and learning? How are we making this better? Should we do this? That's just— I often say that doing marketing in general is a lot like doing or running product. And so this is a product that you're making. The marketing and sales stuff you're making is another product and treat it that way and you'll go further. And people usually like that one. And the other thing I often tell marketers when they're frustrated, oh, sales won't use— they want sequences, they don't use it, or they wanted this sales enablement content and they're not using it. I'm like, you can't really expect every rep to use it right away. Find the ones that really want to work with them. And then if they're driving results off of it, everyone else will come along with them. And you didn't have to spend all this time like politicking, like find the people that want to do it. There's always a couple of salespeople or there's always, you know, at least 25% of salespeople that actually want a lot of your help and are willing to workshop things with you and get you to a place where things work. And then there are always some reps that just like want to be renegades and don't want anything for marketing anyway. And don't try to bring them along. It's the same thing actually with like product adoption in general. Like go after the early adopters, help use those early adopters to get to the next phase, to the next phase, to the next phase. And it's the same thing with internal, internal marketing. Get the most eager salespeople that are easiest to work with on board. Do stuff with them, prove that it works, and then let everyone else do it if they want to. So that's what works. Like, you, it's really hard to change people's minds that don't have the mindset of like, I want to pair with marketing on whatever content it is or whatever campaign it is.

Yeah, I totally agree because very few people think that way, but most people in sales want to have more pipeline and they want to close more deals and do it faster. And so you get the early adopters to create that marketing content for you. And then everybody else is like, oh great, like I can close more revenue with this, then I'll use it, you know?

Yes, exactly. So the proof points, internal proof points really help. So don't feel like you have to get everyone on board with everything you're providing them as a marketer, I think is good advice. So, okay, so we covered most of the numbers, I think. Any other numbers that are good, that are awesome from the report that you think everyone should know?

You know, I think those are some of the the important ones.

So let's talk about how do you solve for this? We've talked about this a little bit already. We've been sharing some tips here and there. I'm specifically interested from you because you build tech for these audiences. What do you think in terms of solving this? What can tech, you know, product, software, AI, whatever, help you? How can it help you solve for these marketing and sales alignment issues? And are there things that tech can't help with and are more like the things we just talked about in team alignment and knowing how to work with other people and work with the right people. So anything that we— anything else to add there?

Yeah, totally. So, um, have you read the Snowflake book on, um, I think it's called Busting Silos, and it's on how they have—

I have not read the full book, but I have read parts of the book.

Yeah, okay, which would be my answer for any book, so don't be offended.

I've read parts of it but not all of it, especially in high school. I'm like, oh yeah, I've read the beginning, middle, and the end. I'm good.

Yeah, my answer to every book is I did not read it. I listen to it on Audible because I can cover a lot more books that way, especially business books. Um, but this one is a really good one. They talk about how they— the sales and marketing team work together, uh, to basically go after target accounts. And, um, they do a lot of one-to-one. And, and in there, like, one of the core tenets is that they have all of these sales and marketing alignment meetings, right? So they meet together with the sales team. So, one ABM manager will have all these meetings and they talk about the account, what's evolved at the account, what the latest conversation was, and based on that, they'll update their landing pages and things like that. So, after this, I was like, okay, like we have to make sure that our product like really sets our customers up for those meetings, that they can, we can make it really easy and they can get everything that they need faster and that they don't need data scientists to pull analytics for them and all that stuff, right? So then I go and I talk to a bunch of our customers and I was like, hey, how do you prep for those meetings? Do you know what the answer was? What meeting? The answer was what meeting? They don't have the meetings, right?

They don't have the meeting.

We don't have the meetings because they're like, there's one of me and there's 100 of them. And I, there's no way that I can spend all week meeting with different enterprise reps. Like it's just not feasible. Maybe I can have a weekly meeting with a sales leader or something like that, but I'm not able to go and do that. And so, I walked out of that with really strong conviction that the key to helping sales and marketing in these situations is to actually eliminate the need for the meeting and to figure out how to solve the problem that the meeting is solving, but with technology in a much more scalable way. So, I think from a technology standpoint, there is, there's probably 3 different ways, at least in which Mutiny solves this. Maybe there's other ways that other companies go about it. But the first one is bringing in the seller's contacts into the marketing campaign and the personalization. So, all of their sales notes, etc. Related to that, it's also making the salesperson the face of the marketing experience. I think this is something you'll relate with, which is I think it's kind of crazy that a buyer can have like 20 interactions with a company's marketing material, and that buyer can be from like a major company like Disney or, you know, someone, or Walmart, and they could have no idea who is the person at that company that's dedicated to them, that's building account plans for them.

And there is someone, you're right. That is crazy. That's, that is crazy.

And like every salesperson will say, people buy from people. And I think it is so true. Like it's those relationships that close deals. And yet it's such a missed opportunity because our marketing is so generic. So it's not just the content, it's also just this missed chance to bring forward the person that is their person that knows them. And I think—

really good, a really good idea. Make the salesperson the face of all of the outreach efforts from the very beginning.

It doesn't like Totally.

Totally.

So, I mean, so those are some examples of bringing the seller's context into the marketing. The reverse is true as well, bringing marketing context into sales. I think this connects a little bit to the lead handoff conversation we were having, which is marketing knows a lot. There's a lot of information about most enterprise or even just any B2B buyer because they've interacted with different websites, blog posts, etc. You know, we also do that, you know, with AI agents. We're also researching that account. So there's a ton of data on the account itself. And so passing that data to the salesperson, we also like recently in the release that we had last week, we also do session replays for the one-to-one experiences. And salespeople love that because they're like, oh my gosh, like I get to really— and I should mention we also pass who is the individual at that company. And so it's super actionable for them. They can see who the person is, they can see the data, etc. So I think the more you can communicate the marketing context to the sales team so that you're not just like, oh, this is a score of 72, but hey, right?

Yeah, I think people struggle here. They struggle both from a, like, a tactical perspective too. Like, so many companies, their ops setup is just so not where I would expect it to be for the stage of those companies. And it's such basic things like sales should be looking at the most recent activity or all the activities. So you've gotta record those activities and you gotta use campaigns to do that. And there's so much, um, RevOps, like hygiene that like just isn't there that would help a lot. So not to put it all on RevOps, I think there's lots of things that need to be done, but to your point about like making the meeting not need to happen, like that's a great way to think about it, but actually instead, I don't think you should not have the meeting. I think the meeting should be spent. Doing more high-value things than just getting super aligned on things you should already be aligned on, right? So all great points. Anything else that you think, feel strongly about, or have strong opinions on when it comes to marketing and sales alignment?

I would say this is another area where tech can help is around the analytics. So I think, you know, we spend a lot of time on target accounts and attribution funnel-based type of analytics really does not work for sales, right? And so, you know, maybe it's good in marketing and I appreciate why people need to do that. And I think that's all good and fine. But if you're trying to build a relationship with sales, they do not give a shit about the funnel. Oh, we move this people from this stage to this stage. You know, I always hear marketers ask for those types of things. But then what I do in those same conversations, I'm like, okay, that's great. Now, can you tell me about the last time you had an interaction with a sales leader or a salesperson and that really where it really resonated, where you shared something about your impact and like you saw that that really made an impact on them? And every single time the answer is win stories. So talking about specific deals, that were closed with credibility that marketing actually closed that deal. So I think less is more rather than— and actually our VP of sales has a really good story around this where he's like, you know, at one of his companies, the VP of marketing would just turn on ABM ads and then would be like, we influenced 80% of pipeline. And he's just like, no, you didn't. You know, we— I closed that account because it was a referral and it just made them lose trust in one another. So I think less is more and be more credible in the analytics that you share. I don't know if you remember when we talked about BS marketing a while ago. I feel like moving away from that and getting really concrete account-level proof points, I think, goes a long way with the sales team.

Yeah, being able to point to those anecdotal examples. I just think the fastest way to have a bad marketing and sales relationship, and I've been in one of these situations, is having like really messed up broken attribution that agrees on. And so, I think you need to agree on the metrics you're gonna look at.

And like we, with AI, like you can solve for that, right? You can have transparency around why this is being recommended, why this is being scored, why this is being handed off, right? You don't have to dump 5,000 data points on them either. You can synthesize that into something that's really simple that resonates with the sales team. So, yeah, I totally, totally agree with that. Great.

I will make sure that the report is shared in the show notes. Thanks for sharing those details. And you should definitely look at it again, because it's beautifully designed. It has lots of interesting stats. You won't feel alone in your fantasy of firing your counterpart. And there's some suggestions on how to fix it. So thanks for chatting with us about the report and about interesting ways tech can help here. And also just other tips in general. I think we covered a lot of ground in a short time. So I'll take this back to my co-host and we'll we'll build more on it for everyone. So really appreciate you being open to being our phone-a-friend on this episode.

Of course. That was awesome. Thanks, Emily.