Creating Alignment between Marketing and Sales | Winston Henderson | 451

Is thought leadership content marketing by another name? And if not, where are the edges between the two? It's a simple question that really deserves a deeper dive. And today I've asked Winston Henderson to join me for this conversation. Winston is the founder and CEO of ICAD Marketing, and he takes a holistic approach to content marketing with a focus on revenue alignment. So today, we're talking about the edges of content marketing and thought leadership, revenue alignment, and outcomes. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin.

Welcome to the show, Winston.

Hey, Bill, thanks for having me.

So you spend a lot of your time talking about the alignment between marketing and sales. My first question is simple. For our audience, what do you mean by that? And why is that something that you spend so much time talking about?

Yeah, that's a great question, Bill. When I say alignment, what I mean by that is, and it's, it's a very specific type of alignment, this revenue alignment, as I call it, where how can marketing and sales work together collaboratively across the entire funnel, across the customer journey, with the intention of driving revenue for the company, right? The reason why that's, that's so important is, over, you know, the course of my career as a marketer, I've also done sales, and now I'm a CEO of my own company. What are the— one of the things I've realized is that there's a disconnect between these three functions in particular, the CEO or leadership function, marketing function, sales function. And how they necessarily work together. And it's a huge problem because you often hear sales complaining, well, marketing doesn't give us quality leads, um, you know, the leads that marketing gives us are trash. Or you hear marketing say, well, this— the leads that we, we pass to sales, you know, they're not following up, they're not closing those leads. Or you hear marketing say, well, you know, um, I work for a CEO who doesn't get marketing because we're trying to get budget and so on. So let me just give you some, some context and background around this. It was 2017, '18, thereabouts. I live in Jamaica, so I decided that I wanted to do a state of marketing report interviewing— well, it wasn't an interview, it was more a survey, surveying 100 marketers here in Jamaica, right? Because I wanted to understand what are the challenges that marketers outside of myself were experiencing. So after, after conducting that survey, one of the things that the report showed was that 87% of marketers actually said that budget was their biggest roadblock or hindrance to them achieving the marketing objectives that they have. And then the second aspect to that is when I asked, well, what's the greatest priority for you? About 50-something, close to 60%, said that some sort of revenue, some sort of sales-led activity or priority is what stays for them. But one of the things I noticed from the data and also through my observation and conversation with other marketers is that there is a disconnect between what they say is a priority, which is, you know, revenue, and what their focus was, which primarily most of the time is brand awareness, brand building. And it's not that anything is wrong with brand awareness, you do need that, but in terms of the priorities, there was a disconnect there. And I quickly made or connected the dots to say, well, marketers said that— 87% of marketers said that their biggest challenge is more budget, and they can't get that buying. But probably the reason is because they're not aligned around revenue. So there's a disconnect there. So that, that entire idea, it probably could even be considered the birth of my thought leadership around revenue alignment. Is what led to where we are today, where I speak a lot about that.

So one of the things that resonates with me on this concept of revenue alignment is not just marketing, but also thought leadership, right? And so thought leadership, because it's sometimes used even before traditional marketing starts, right, to build brand, to be out there. It is harder to say, oh, we're doing this and it ties to this purpose, right? In terms of sales. So let's dive in a little bit further on revenue alignment. If I were to push you and say, define it in a couple of sentences, what is revenue alignment and what does it look like when it's done right?

Revenue alignment can— first of all, let me, let me just preface the answer with this, that revenue alignment isn't just limited to marketing and sales. It could also be customer success. It could also be product marketers, product managers, and so on. But for the sake of this conversation, let's, let's limit this response to marketing and sales. So going back to what I said earlier, it's really simple. Marketing revenue alignment is how do you get marketing and sales to work together across the entire customer journey, across the entire funnel, with the intention of driving revenue. And in terms of what it looks like when it's done well, for me, this is what it looks like. It looks like where throughout that entire customer journey, marketing understands which aspect of that journey they take the lead, and when should sales actually come in and take over that lead from marketing to— and then marketing actually supports sales to close those deals, right? It's alignment around, well, who are our ideal clients or customers? What's the definition of a good lead? So that when that lead handover happens, sales isn't going to complain, well, marketing gave us bad leads, because at the end of the day, both functions came together and decided what a good lead is. So there's no way sales can complain that, you know, that lead is bad if they're the ones that help to define that criteria for that good lead. For me, it looks like also in terms of the success of that, where it's not a competition between who gets attributed to the revenue, like, is it marketing that, you know, is the result of that revenue growth, or these deals being closed, or is it sales? Like, there's no competition between who should the praise or the reward go to. It's all of us as a team actually helped to close these deals, and marketing gets the credit they deserve. Sales get the credit that they deserve. So it's all playing on the same team, right? When you have, you know, for us in Jamaica, we call it football, but you guys would consider it soccer. When a team wins the game, no one says, well, it's the goalkeeper that the reason why, you know, we won the game because that person saved a lot of the goals. Or it's not the midfielder that was able to pass the ball between our side to their side. Or it's not the person who scored the most goals as a result of us winning. Typically, it's, well, it was a team effort, and each person played their part, but the team shares the win as a whole. And for me, that's the ultimate, I would say, measure of success where revenue alignment is concerned, where everyone on the team shares in that win to say, well, each person had their contribution. And as a result, this is what we were able to do in terms of that revenue growth.

Well, and I think one of the things there is, to continue with a sports metaphor for a moment, and then we'll probably pull back, there's a difference between the overall final score of the game, which everyone contributed to, and then the individual performance stats. If you're the goalie, how many saves did you make, right? Everyone has individual performance metrics, but you have to balance especially on attribution between the individual's performance and the team's performance. And so if you put too much weight within an organizational structure on attribution for individual effort, then you start getting outcomes where everybody's trying to maximize their share of the win rather than go after the win.

Yeah, exactly. And you may— you make a very good point in terms of— and I think that also contributes to, um, to your point. So the reason why alignment often doesn't work is everyone is so focused on their individual performance. And a lot of the times, a lot of that stems from leadership, right? Because you'll have leadership say, well, the reason why we were able to generate this amount of sales or grow the revenue of the company by this amount is because of what sales is doing and marketing doesn't necessarily hold any value. Now, the argument can be made as to, is marketing really demonstrating and communicating their value? Well, they should. Or if they are, you know, is it that the CEO is just someone that's very egotistical that, you know, thinks they know it all? Because I mean, it can swing both ways, but that's not necessarily a conversation I'm going to get into for this episode. But Definitely that, that individual performance, when everyone focuses on that, not to say that each person shouldn't be judged on their individual performance because, you know, you want to know that each specific function is doing what they're supposed to be doing or what they're paid to do. But at the same time, knowing that it's more, I would say, a benchmark or an indicator if we're on the right track versus, well, we're going to judge success or failure of marketing separate from sales where revenue generation is concerned.

Now I want to pull us into the world of thought leadership here. And one of the reasons I like the clarity around revenue alignment is because when you transport that into thought leadership, there are many different things that thought leadership can do. You can have thought leadership that's focused on revenue, you can focus on attracting talent. You can talk about growing talent, retaining talent. There are many different things you can do through thought leadership. But if you're not clear on what you're trying to do with the thought leadership, that's almost the same problem as not having the clarity around revenue alignment.

Right. Yeah. And you make a very good point there a while ago, Bill, where you mentioned about What's our purpose for thought leadership? Because I'm sure you've experienced this, just as how people confuse, well, thought leadership is just thought leadership, it all fits into one bucket. It's the same thing with content marketing where a lot of people fit content marketing in this one bucket. So they focus heavily on the top of the funnel metrics, um, in terms of its purpose. It's just for building brand, it's just for building community engagement, and so on, where Content marketing, just like thought leadership, is multifaceted. It's not limited to just one thing. It serves many different purposes, and how you measure each in terms of the impact depends on what the purpose that it's aligned or are supposed to work towards.

So you mentioned content marketing, and this is probably a good place to ask this question. What's the difference between content marketing and thought leadership, in your opinion, Winston? I know we could go for and ask many people, but I want to hear your take on this?

Yeah, it's— yeah, you and I have had this conversation, and I really love how you define it. But for me, here's, here's how I look at thought leadership versus content marketing. And, you know, you're the expert, so, and I'm sure you could, you could tell me if I'm right or wrong, but I see thought leadership as we have an idea that we're trying to put out into the world to do one of two things. Either we want to attract the people who believe what we believe into our circle for a cause or into our community, or we want to put the idea out there of showing people, well, the current belief that you're holding isn't serving you. Here's a new belief, and this is how it helps everyone win. So I see more as when I thought— when I talk about thought leadership content, I see more as I call it industry or category level content where it's not focused on driving business. For me, it's not focused on generating sales or revenue. Um, yes, it can serve that purpose, but how I see it, I see it as a way— how, how can we lift the industry or the category on a whole so that everyone benefits? Not just my business, not just the people within my community, but the entire category, the entire industry on a whole benefits versus content marketing. It's very business focused where I'm executing content marketing because I'm trying to grow my business. I want a specific outcome that's geared towards or benefits my business in particular. That's how I look at it.

So there's a couple interesting pieces that you said there. One is the concept of category, right? Because I think one of the things you can use thought leadership for is category creation. And you can show people that, hey, there's a new way to solve this problem, not the old way that you've been following before. The other distinction that I want to call out is when you start getting down to the product level or the service level and product marketing, for example, it is very hard to have product marketing, which can also be called thought leadership. Because when you're talking about your stuff, it is very hard to stay in the realm of ideas.

Yeah. And I mean, I know you're the host, Bill, but I'd love for you to expound on that because that was a very interesting point that you just raised around the whole idea of thought leadership within a product marketing context. I would love, I mean, for my selfish purposes, maybe the audience is interested in brief. Yeah.

And I, this is a conversation, right? So in brief, I think when you get into product marketing, you're talking about benefits, pain points, you know, solving specific problems. You may even be down on the features level, depending on what you're selling. And it is very hard to insert ideas into that. Or if you lead with ideas, and then all of a sudden, somewhere midway through, you pivot and you start talking about, and here's our solution, all of a sudden everybody smells, oh, here's the sales pitch, right? And it's very different and it forces a different call to action because you've got calls to action which are going to move someone along a customer journey and you've got calls to action which are education. And so if you blend those two, it just gets messy.

Yeah, and, and that's a great point. And here's why I say that's a great point. Going back to what I said earlier around the purpose, the knowing different purposes for whether it's thought leadership, whether it's content marketing, and being able to make that distinction, especially— and this is more for the marketers now— where a lot of times you, you— I've seen it— you'll have marketers who want to implement a content marketing program but they're not very clear on, well, in terms of the distinction between, you know, using your words, content that's meant for educational purposes versus content that's meant to drive a lead or a sale for the business. So what happens is that they pretty much lump all different types of content into one, and when they approach the CEO or whoever to get buy-in for this content marketing program, you know, after the first month or two, the CEO will say, well, you know, what happened to all the leads? You know, where are the leads? Where the business, where's the ROI that's coming from this? And you're not able to explain that. Whereas if you started out saying, hey, here's two piece or two purposes of content. Content over here for educational purposes, we're using that to build brand, to build up our brand equity or brand affinity in the market, which, you know, will also help us to reduce sales cycles. It will help us to attract higher value deals. It will help to make the sales process for sales more efficient, more effective, right? It's not a direct ROI to revenue, but it will help to leverage to make the sales process and the sales outcome a lot easier for our team. Versus over here where you have content that's meant to generate business, generate demand, generate leads. And let's say we're going to spend 70% of our budget on the lead generation aspect of the content or demand generation, whichever term that's politically correct to you. And then over here, we're going to focus on the educational aspect, and that's 30% of the budget. So this 30% over here, don't expect direct ROI from here. But here's the business case for why this 30% is important, but expect ROI from this 70% over here.

Or what I would say is because thought leadership can get into attribution, it can get into alignment with revenue, it's on a longer term. Don't expect revenue on the same time frame as your content marketing, right? You will see results, you will see a return, but it's not going to happen at the same scale as a content marketing campaign, right?

Right, exactly.

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So let's get practical here. You've been talking about revenue alignment quite a while now. What are 3 things that people could do if they are marketers to start focusing on this concept of revenue alignment? What can they take practically back and start doing differently?

That's a great question, Bill, and I'm happy you asked it because I was literally having a conversation with a client of mine a few weeks ago around this. So The first thing I would say is, well, a lot of the reasons— let's start with a lot of the reasons why, or a few reasons why alignment often doesn't work from the marketing point of view. One is that marketers are communicating or making a business case in terms of marketing metrics, not business metrics. And there's a difference, right? Marketing metrics are things like likes, clicks, how many people shared it, how many people, you know, website traffic that we have. Business metrics are What's the top line revenue for this? What's our opportunity to close one conversions and so on? So that's the first thing. The second thing—

and your CFO is going to look at likes and clicks and say, where do I put them on the balance sheet? Right?

Exactly. Exactly. The second thing is not tying marketing activities to business outcomes such as revenue. The other thing is around marketers tend to only focus on what they see as value. And not what other stakeholders who are non-marketing functions see as value. So that's the first thing. So in terms of answering your question, here are 3 things. The first thing I would say is that the best way to get buying is to use data, right? And I would start with customer research of existing customers to say, hey, why, why, why did you buy from us? Like, what's the reason why you chose us over the competitors? And walk us through what that buyer's journey is like, right? And I gave you an, I give you an example of this. I remember I was working with a direct-to-consumer client, and the marketing team there had the hardest time struggling to get buying, to get more marketing budget. So I went and I spoke with a few of their customers, and I made a list of top 5 reasons why they bought, from highest to lowest. And I said, all right, here's what we're going to do. We're going to build out our entire marketing campaign around this.. And we executed on that. We got some pretty good results pretty early on, like within the first 2 weeks. And with that, we were able to take that data back to the CEO to say, hey, we executed on this based on our customer research, based on the data. These are— this is a result that it was yet able to generate in terms of that return on investment. In, in order to ramp up what we're already doing through what we've tested, we need an increase in budget. And as a result of that, the team was able to 10x, um, the budget that they got for that specific campaign and just the marketing budget overall. So that's the first thing— do the customer research, gather the data necessary to make the business case. The second thing I would say is to go and have conversations with non-marketing functions. So the CEO, the, the sales heads, the, the CFO, customer success, anyone that's not a marketer. Why? One of the things I've realized is that as marketers, we, we kind of exist in our echo chamber, right? I call the marketing bubble. And the problem is that if, let's say for example, using this wall, if you exist in a, in an echo chamber that says the wall is red, the wall is red, the wall is red, eventually you're going to start to believe that the wall is red without actually looking for yourself to assess, well, is the wall really red, or is it just what everyone else believes but it's really blue? So the important thing with that is going to your CEO to say, hey CEO, um, how do you measure the success or the value of marketing? What do you expect from me? How do you see marketing actually contributing to the overall business objectives, right? I'm going to the CFO saying, hey CFO, how do you determine what projects actually gets budget allocated to and which doesn't. Like, what are some of the things that we should be focusing on to ensure that when that budget is being allocated at the beginning of the financial year, that we can actually get a sizable piece of that budget? Because, you know, we know that this is what you're looking for. And if we can deliver on these things, then it will make that investment worth it. You know, going to the sales team, say, hey, sales team, you know, some of the things that I mentioned earlier, what makes a good quality lead for you? What are some of the gaps that exist right now in the sales process that you believe we could help with? Or just even interviewing them and then, you know, through understanding what your function is as a marketer or your role is, then you can identify what the gaps are and what you need to do to fill those gaps. So that's the second thing. The third thing I would say is in terms of getting better alignment, and this is, this is probably a huge one is just understanding mindset, right? And I think I kind of mentioned it earlier, but being able to develop a business mindset versus a marketing mindset, which is two completely different things, because a marketer's mindset is I'm just focused on marketing. I see everything through a marketing lens versus a business mindset is, well, marketing is just one piece of the business, but how does it connect now to all the other different pieces within the organization? To make everything function as a whole engine, as a whole system, to move us into the direction that we need to move in, and then knowing how to better align with other different functions within the organization.

And I think you mentioned something here that's worth underscoring. The difference in mindset is often huge. So if you spend your days in thought leadership and you're asking yourself the question, How do I get this idea out into the world? How do I take this idea to scale? You have to stop and shift your mindset and say, okay, what does this look from a marketing mindset? What does this look like from senior leadership's mindset? It is very easy to get into that tunnel vision and not pull out. And you mentioned something recently. Around empathy, which I want to come to because I think empathy breaks that tunnel vision. Can you say more?

Yeah, empathy is huge, Bill. I can't even begin to tell you the amount of conversations I've had where I've went into an organization to work with that organization. I spoke with the marketing team. I spoke with the sales team, and when I'm comparing notes, I realized, wait, the reason why alignment is so difficult is because marketers are seeing things through their tunnel vision, sales is seeing things through their tunnel vision, but no one is really taking the time to come to the table to understand the other person's point of view. And it goes back to what I mentioned in terms of that second point of speaking to non-marketing functions, because The only way you can get empathy is through understanding the other person's point of view or perspective. The only way you can get that understanding is through communication, right? So that communication has to be that first step. And I think one of the reasons, and I've noticed this with people who have done both sales and marketing, the reason why it's so easy for them to, to, to balance both is because they understand both roles through their own experience, right? So for me as a marketer, I understand the pressures that marketers go through in terms of trying to get buying for campaigns, trying to get budget, trying to get the creative freedom to execute the type of campaigns you want to. From the sales side, I understand how difficult it is trying to just get on the phone with a decision maker, just to have that initial conversation, to get that meeting. The trials that come with following up and the frustrations that come with following up with a prospect once you've met with them, they've shown interest, and then they ghost you and, you know, they're nowhere to be found. And that pressure that comes with at the end of each month or each quarter where you're trying to meet your quota because you know if you don't meet quota, you don't have a paycheck that month, right? So there's a lot of pressure from both sides. And I think everything in terms of the foundation of alignment between marketing and sales starts with that empathy, starts with let me, let me get out of my own shoes or that tunnel vision and put myself in the other person's shoes and try to understand where they're coming from. They do the same of trying to understand where I'm coming from. And we come to some sort of compromise and agreement that, all right, let's see how we can help each other to reduce the pressures and the challenges that we both face. And we're both able to meet whatever goals or objectives that are set for us by the CEO or the organization.

I think that's a great explanation. And it takes conscious effort. That ability to start with empathy and go have conversations and really hear what the other team is saying or members of the other team are saying. You can't just assume it's going to happen. If you're a leader, you've got to model that behavior. You've got to create opportunities for those conversations. And if you're on the team yourself, don't wait for others to create that opportunity. Go make it happen because I think in today's world, and this comes to the underlying conversation around alignment, is if you're not looking left and you're not looking right in the organization, you will not be aligned because you don't understand what's going on because we are so cross-matrixed and we have one piece of a big puzzle.

Yeah, definitely. And, and just to add to what you just said, one of the reasons why I love your content so much, Bill, around thought leadership is thought leadership— I mean, speaking from a marketing point of view, thought leadership to me is the best way how marketers can get buying for what they're doing. Because, you know, this whole idea of putting an idea out there trying to get buying, get trying to get people to believe what you believe and bring them over to your cause. You know, executing on that, whatever channel or means or distribution that you use to get that idea out there, that will be up to you because you understand your organization. But just that whole idea of, well, rather than me saying I'm never going to work for a CEO who doesn't get marketing, you know, switch that mindset to, well, my CEO doesn't understand marketing. How can I position or communicate in a way that that person gets it, that he gets it or she gets it? And really using thought leadership as a way to bring that idea to the forefront and communicate it consistently. Initially, they're not going to get it when you're trying to communicate with them. But over time, as that idea is communicated constantly and consistently, at some point they're going to go, huh, That does make sense. Let's talk some more about it.

And if you can sway someone to share an idea that you've been trying to put out in the world, then the world of the marketer becomes a lot easier. Because when you start talking about product or solution, if they're starting from a similar starting point and they agree on similar things, that journey is easier.

Yeah, definitely.

So as we begin to wrap up, Winston, I want to ask you a question. You've been in the world of marketing for a number of years now. What do you wish you knew when you were starting out that you know now? What would you tell your younger self?

There's so many things. There's so many things. Um, I'll give you 3. I know you asked for like probably one or the top one, but I'll give you—

no, but 3 is fine.

Yeah, the first one goes back to the entire theme of this conversation, which is I wish I spent more time with CEOs and trying to understand their, their perspective. Because it wasn't until I really started running my own business, being, being a CEO myself, I really understood the pressures of running your own business and what it takes to build to do it. There's so many things you have to think about, not just marketing. Like, there's so many other things that you have to think about— sales, finance, um, if you have people that you're hiring who's a part of your team, HR, and, you know, understanding how to lead a team and so on. Um, so that's the first thing, definitely. The second thing is to spend more time documenting your successes. I came to this realization when I started freelancing. This is like right before I actually officially registered the business and the marketing agency where I would go in these conversations as a freelancer and people will ask me, well, what body of work do you have? Like, who have you done work for? Who have you delivered results for? And it's not that I hadn't, and it's not that I didn't know the answer, but because I hadn't thought about it and I hadn't documented it. It made it very difficult for me to communicate clearly and answer those questions. And I realized I lost a lot of deals that I didn't have to lose if I had actually documented that work, even just putting it on like a single-page website and just saying, hey, here's a link to that, you can go and read up on what I've done. So that's the second thing. The third thing is to network a lot. And build relationships, right? I've realized that my journey could have been made a lot easier if I had spent a lot more time networking and building relationships.

I think those are 3 great pieces of advice. And from a thought leadership perspective, speaking for people who are practitioners of thought leadership, the network is huge. You have to be building it constantly. And assume that it's not going to be one conversation and done. You've got to be out there every day. Winston, I want to thank you for joining us on this conversation. This has been a lot of fun.

Thanks for having me, Bill. It's always a pleasure having conversations with you. I always feel like I walk away learning something new when I speak with you.

Oh, that's mutual, Winston. Thank you.

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