Becoming a Marketer with a Sales Perspective with Arthur Castillo

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What do you think is changing there? Right? So we say like the buying process doesn't match the sales process. How so? And what do you think needs to change? And we'll come back to part two and what terms of what marketing can learn from sales. But like you touched on that brief, let's talk through it. Like what are you seeing changing? How are they misaligned?

I think the days of willing yourself pure outbound to like 10 million ARR can be tougher and tougher now and especially across like the past year and a half, the rise of communities and having access to your peers. That's the number one most trusted source now. Right? I'm going to go into a pavilion, a recognius Katie's Patreon and say hey, are you guys solving this issue? This seems to be a bigger issue for me. You're going to get a lot of answers from your peers. Maybe they even give you a short list of vendors. That's now who I'm going to check out. I think I'm guessing it still happens but Gone are the days where it's like capture my email and you're going to nurture me across 20 steps to the point where I'm like, oh, that's a really good point. Now I'm ready to buy. I think no longer are people going to buy that way. And that's kind of how we're going about doing outbound sales. Right. I think your, your organization probably a lot different, right. Educating, leading with value. Maybe something that they hadn't thought about, that's a lot different. But think it just like nurturing them and getting the touch points in place. That's not going to lead me any closer to a purchasing this purchasing decision. And that's what I saw changing, right. Like this pure activity focus. Let's go and spray and pray. Maybe that worked in the past. I mean I don't know if it ever worked. But that's really what I see being a lot different. Where they have the access to their peers. Right. The I can hop on a zoom with you. Whereas before maybe we'd have to go to local meetup just getting that access to peers and communities and starting there first. I don't need to basically the demo is like the last step. Right. Where we're typically trying to make the demo the first step in sales. So that's what I see. I think gone are the days of nurturing people through email to point of purchase. Now buyers are looping like you mentioned. I think, yeah, once they hear something enough times from their peers, that's when they're like, okay, I'm going to check this out or is prone to keep big enough that now I'm going to go out and do some research on my own to see what I can do.

I think that's it's key, right. I think that's one of the things that's going to be very interesting over the next three to four years is like I believe all those things are true. But what's going to make it hard for a lot of companies is you can't grow as fast that way. If you are just waiting for someone to have the idea to look on how to solve a problem, you're not driving that engagement. Right. It's like once they've decided all those things work.

But like how do you help people decide?

And it's getting harder and harder to get in front of people to plant that idea, to plant the ideas around, like maybe I should try to fix this was very interesting to watch how that plays out because for a lot of companies they can't just sit back and wait on inbound. Like, I wish I had more inbound. That would be great. Can't do that. You know, I've got 150 people on my team. I don't have enough inbound demo requests to support all of that. And so it'll be very interesting to watch how this changes over time. So let's come back to the other part of this. Right. So you talk about, you know, like what, you know, sales to learn from marketing. What about marketing learning from sales. You know, you are a salesperson. What are you bringing over to the marketing side that's helping that marketing team support the sales team a little bit better?

I think. Yeah. For me, one of the huge benefits is like really understanding the funnel after they enter it. Right. And what it really takes to get someone from. Okay, there's a little bit of interest here all the way straight through their purchase, depending on the department. I find a lot of the time, maybe if you're in like product marketing and you're talking to customers quite a bit, but there's not enough marketers talking customers to really understand, typically sales playing the game of telephone and saying, hey, this, this is what matters most. And then marketing goes off and does a white paper on that could be true. I think there, there's really good feedback from sales, but I think there's something to be said about hearing it firsthand from the customer, understanding their. Their problems that they're trying to solve or where they're trying to get to. I think that's a pretty key thing. And you know what? I think a lot of marketers are starting to do that. I've heard a lot of, you know, Dave Gerhardt talked about, like listening on gong calls and things like that. Right. So you can actually hear directly from the customer rather than gating it and having different people tell you, hey, this is what the customer said.

I think that's so huge. Right. So all my marketers listening, it's one step to then, you know, to at least listen to the sales calls, at least listen to some sales calls, but.

Talk to some customers, talk to em.

Understand how they use the product. Because that's the other side of this too is like we talk about salespeople not using the product. How many marketers use their product. Right. Like it's even a smaller amount there that actually use it. They might benefit from it. They don't necessarily use the product day in and day out. There's just such a gap there always. Right. And that's where Sales sees an email or a white paper and goes, what is this about? Like, who did you talk to to think this was a good idea? And so, like, what are some things that they should talk to the customers about? Let's give them, like, a little framework or idea of, like, okay, cool. So I need to talk to customers. What do I ask them?

Yeah, man. And you have, like, great resources on your Patreon for this, by the way. I remember I was going through, like, your customer interview list. Let me see if I can rhyme some off the top. I think one that you had that was really great. How would you describe our product or service to somebody in your position? That right there should be, like, your positioning. Right. Hear how your end user is explaining your product or service to another end user. That's the. That's money right there, I think, trying to get what led them to that buying trigger.

Right.

What was it toward? They ran. Was it a peer community? And if. Let's say it was a community. Okay, a community. Is that so I can learn a little bit more? Because now you really want to understand where your buyers are getting information in order to trigger that buying journey. So any questions around that, I think is great. I think the value that they got from it. What can you do now that you couldn't before? That one's really huge. To get them to contrast. Right. Coming into this, there was no way I could do X, Y, and Z. Now I don't even think about that. It's not even an issue for them, for us. So those are the couple ones that come to mind. But I know you have a ton on this too. What do you typically ask?

Well, before I go down, what I.

Would ask, I'm gonna go one step further because you're the marketer. So you've asked those questions. How should you use them? Because that's the next level. Okay. So I talked. I asked those questions. What should marketers do with what they learned from those conversations?

Yeah, I mean, ideally, find a framework that you can feed that feedback back to sales and say, hey, by the way, I know we were talking about this being a huge thing. We just did 10 customer interviews, and eight of them came in for this reason. So I think we should really start highlighting that in our demos. Right. Of, like, this is what seems to happen. I know you do a great job of this too, where, like, when you're building your outbound program, you go to the marketing leader and you're like, what are the top things that they're clicking into? Right. So you can start to frame. It's almost a validation of like, okay, this seems to be what they care about. How do I now convert that to outbound messaging? What else can they do? I think video testimonials are huge, right? And especially if you cover that any. Like, if. If a buyer can learn from one of their peers over a sales rep, they have way more credibility than. Than a sales rep, right? Partly because we talked about as a sales rep, you probably never have done the job or you probably have never used the service that you're about to sell to the person that's doing the job. So I think any resources that you can equip your sales team with to say, hey, take it from me, take it from this expert in your industry, that's going to carry a lot more credibility. But to me, I don't know, I always found, like, the buying triggers fascinating to really get into that. That's probably more of a personal preference of, like, what the heck got them to say, hey, I need to fix this problem.