[Leadership] Aligning marketing and sales with Alec McChesney

If you don't like prospecting, you should not be in sales. It's a non negotiable for me. If you cannot prospect, you do not belong in sales. If, however, you want to prospect and you are not sure who to prospect, it is a failure at the top level of your sales team, your marketing team, and your overall organization. And this is the take that gets me in the most amount of trouble is if you do not have an ICP that is narrowly or at least defined in a certain area to let your sales team go and prospect efficiently, your sales team won't want to work there.

Before we get into today's show, I wanted to tell you a little bit about what we have going on over here at Succession. So Succession is a life science sales membership that includes on demand courses to uplevel your sales skills, resources to plan and execute your sales process, a community for peer to peer networking and learning, and live workshops delivered by experts twice a month. You can get access to all of this as an individual for just $79 a month. Or you can uplevel your entire sales team with courses and customized learning designed for each individual rep. Come and join us over at Succession Bio. Okay, let's dive back into the show. Hey, welcome to another episode of the Sales DNA podcast. Unfortunately, Nick could not join us here today, so it's just me. But I have an interview here with Alec McChesney. He is the director of Business development over at Score Marketing, and we talk all about sales and marketing alignment in this one. So we're talking about it from the leadership level, making sure that you set the right goals and objectives, and then that those goals and objectives get disseminated down through the rest of the team to create a feedback loop and an environment that does not become toxic. And so it's making sure that every team is working on the right set objectives. They're measured appropriately, and that way your sales and marketing engine are both working together to drive revenue. Right. So that's what we talk about today. Should be a really good one. And so with that, let's jump on into the show. Hey, Alec, welcome to the podcast. We're pumped to have you here, Harrison.

I am. I'm so excited for for this conversation today. Thanks for having me on the podcast.

Yeah. And you had the chance to drill me on your podcast with questions the other day, and so now we're getting it in reverse. And so now I get a chance to ask you all the questions. But I did prep you for this one, which we always ask, which is give us a crazy or funny story that's happened in your career.

Okay. And I. I didn't. I didn't warn you about this when you. You hinted it. And so this actually is a. A crazy story. So about four years ago, I was at a different marketing agency that was working with nonprofits all over the country at that time. And I actually had a visit into Dallas, Texas, with a client of mine who was a nonprofit working in a small town outside of Dallas, working to bring fishing and just education to after school programs in the area. And I fly down there. It's still the COVID 19 pandemic. It's 2021. And so it was a unique time to be flying. All the things. I get there, and we go and have this incredible conversation presentation to the board of this small town. And my. My client at the time walks back up to me and he says, how did it go? And I said, you were. You were there. You. You just dominated. It was fantastic. Everything. And he had a stroke right before our. Right before the presentation. Did the entire presentation. Michael Jordan flu game. Unbelievable. Essentially blacked out, got the deal, went to the doctor's office. They were like, yeah, you had a minor stroke during, like, right before that meeting. Completely healthy. The reason I can tell this story is he's completely healthy and all things are good four years later. But at the time, I had just flown down. It was my second time meeting him in person, all the things. And I was so overwhelmed, and I was really interesting to be a part of. But I still go back to. It was the best. I mean, an hour's worth of perfection in terms of sales presentation for a nonprofit. And I think I learned more in that presentation than I did in 10 before that. But I've always said that that's like the Met when. If I ever write a memoir, that whole 24 hours of chaos that ensued after that is truly. It's a crazy work story. And that's the first time I think I've ever told that on. On in any type of content, so. You're welcome, Harrison.

That's wild. Well, we get the exclusives here.

Yes.

That is cr. Oh, man. Yeah. Having a. I couldn't even imagine, like, just don't even remember the greatest presentation of your.

Yes, I. Like, I have first.

Was it recorded on Zoom or something?

So it was. And. But at first I thought it was a bit like. I thought he, like, was making the joke, like, oh, how did that go? When it's like, we just. We just locked it in. We Just did incredible. Like. No, it was for real.

People joke about that stuff all the time where they're just like, oh, yeah, I blacked out up there.

Yeah, yeah, you're in the zone.

Literally did lit.

Quite literally did. And. And so I. Jimmy, I always. I. I text him, like, once every six months just to say, like, I think about it all the time and. Because I, you know, obviously don't work there anymore and don't work with him, but it comes up all the time. I'm like, what an incredible. What an incredible 24 hours. That's awesome in every way. Yeah.

Cool. Well, glad he's all right. And.

Yeah, you didn't see that one coming. Harrison, I put you on the spot. You put me on the spot. I put it right back to you.

I love it. Well, now we're going to put each other on the spot because we're talking about marketing and sales alignment from the leadership level all the way down to the individuals. So, you know, let's talk about it. You know, I would say why don't we start with the hard topic, which is there are absolutely teams out there right now that have a toxic relationship between marketing and sales. How do we go about resolving this? Right. Let's say we're leaders at these companies. We're on the same team, per se. Right? Hey, toxic relationship. On the same team. But we're on the same team. From a leadership perspective, how do we work together to resolve this sort of toxic relationship that's come up?

Yeah, you saw my smile the moment you mentioned marketing and sales together, because you're right. There are teams all over the world that have this problem, and it's a huge problem, especially in our industry where. Where there are these silos between the teams, which then lead to kind of that resentment, and they're butting heads, and it is a toxic and negative relationship. And I think the word that I always go to there, Harrison, is that silo. When I see the. The negative relationships, the toxic relationships, it's because they are completely separate and they are playing in different fields. They are playing different sports. They have different goals. They have different numbers that they're hitting. They have different metrics. And so when they have that toxicity, they know that they have to work together, but they don't want to. They don't want that relationship. They view it as us versus them, who's responsible. And so I know we're going to get into, there's the leadership level at the executive level of the organization, then there's the marketing and Sales leaders. And then there's the individual like sales rep or, or marketing director or marketing manager role that you have there. And everybody has their own role to play in this relationship. But if there is a severed relationship where it's, it's pure play toxicity, it's negative and it looks like there, there's no solve to that. It has to come from, from the top down. Right. Like a sales rep is not going to, to solve that problem. And so really creating that alignment between the two is arguably the first step that has to happen. It's also the hardest step because then you're shifting goals. You might be shifting the way people are comped, you might be shifting the way that their, their bonus structure, their goal structure is set up. And that's not something that you can change overnight without getting worse before, before you get better.

Yeah, I mean I think you hit on a big part there, which is the, you know, the goals and how people are incentivized. Right. Marketing is incentivized to generate like a number of leads and sales is going to be incentivized on revenue. I mean those two aren't like, they don't necessarily go hand in hand. It's like that alone is, you know, an issue. Right. So how do you think about this from a goal setting perspective? Because I feel like that is where, where this stems from, which is sales leader doesn't think the marketing leader has their best interests in mind. Marketing leaders, like why, why the heck aren't you following up with, you know, the leads that I'm sending over? Right. Your sales team's wasting them, you're burning them. Sales are like, you're sending me shitty leads. Right. So it's like, how do we resolve this, you know, tension? You're sort of at the root, the root, the root cause of the whole thing.

Yeah. One of the big beliefs that, that we have at SCORE is let's try to solve tension in process one time in a really difficult four hour meeting than that tension coming up every month and every quarter and sometimes every week and building and becoming irreparable. And so for me it does start with this really important meeting that I'm already talking about. Annual planning. It's July 17th and I think annual planning should, should be on people's minds because the next couple of months are super important for 2025. But let's say it's September, maybe it's October. I need to, I need to have both of those teams and maybe it's the leaders first and then it's even the secondary teams, you know, the, the individual contributors. I want everybody in sessions at the same time. So I don't want a chief business officer or even a CEO, depending on the size of your company, having a planning only meeting with sales and then a separate planning meeting with, with marketing. That meeting has to happen together.

Oh, well, no, just you see this all the time where it's funny where you get even. Say you have the cbo, right? And it's like, hey, go sales, go make your plan. Marketing, go make your plan. And then we're going to present them together, right? And it's like, what the, what do you think's going to happen if they're going off and hiding in a corner doing their thing and they're off in the other corner saying, like, you know, I'm going to do these other activities. It doesn't work that way. But it's so often it's like, go build your slides and then come back and present them together.

And, and the word that I just, I despise it because you said it perfectly is slides. And I can't tell you how many times we've heard, oh yeah, our plan, yeah, go, go present the slides. And it's eight slides is your marketing plan for the year. And then there's seven slides for the sales plan for the year. And they, there's no lead up to it, there's no story, there's no tying back to the business objectives for the year. It's just a handful of slides. And that is tactics too, right?

They're just like, oh, we're going to go to this event or we're going to try and sell this product and whatever it is, right?

We're going to run an email campaign that, you know, runs through the summer and it's like, okay, how is that going to help in anything or anyone here? And I, I feel like a lot of times, and I'm new to your audience, so I guess this is a good way to introduce myself. But like I on tactics all the time, I, I am not a tactic oriented person because I believe that if you have the right strategy and the right message, then I could go play in any area and I could be successful with the tactics, right? Certainly there are some things, you know, there's industries and there's channels and there's trade shows and, you know, I'll have more success on LinkedIn than I will on, on TikTok, certainly. But podcast, video, all the different things, right? Like, that's not a big deal to me. You can, you can figure that out. Secondary. And so when you do have that list of tactics, just list of shows and that same thing from, you know, a sales side, like, I can't tell you how many sales decks I've seen for goals and it's just numbers of meetings that we want to set and it's like, okay, well let's, let's take a step back and how many of those are with our target A companies? How many are with target B? Do we have that breakdown? Do we have that understanding? Does marketing have that understanding?

And are you working with the same accounts? Are they the same accounts? The marketing, sales. If I were to ask marketing, what are our top 50 companies? And I asked sales, what are our top 50 companies, how often do you think they'd say the same thing?

4% of the 4%. 4%. 4% of, of the time it is, that is, I, I have to, I have to rein it a little bit. That is such a good call out, Harrison, in terms of, of the, the absolute silo and gap between the two teams, that, that should not happen. Right. Like that there should not be a scenario that you could go to a marketing team and to a sales team and ask them to write down 10 companies that we want to go after. And, and, and we're not naming the.

Same unless it's, unless like you just decide we're going to name the top 10 pharma. Right?

Correct. Correct.

You could get lucky if that's the case.

Right? Yes.

Yeah.

So like it is, but I think that goes to. You asked a question when we were offline and we're kind of jumping all over so you can reign me in a little bit. But you asked about like, how does a sales rep work with marketing and how did, and I think that's a huge area where we believe in this feedback loop and having standing touch bases with everybody on your sales team. If you have, I get it right, some sales teams, 50, 60, 100, 100 plus people, you're going to have to separate things out. You're going to have to create a way for structure for that feedback, feedback loop. But if you have 12 sales reps, if you have six sales reps anywhere in that range, there's no doubt that you could be able to have a feedback loop in terms of who are you going after, what are we hearing from them? Do we have an updated list of who we're competing against, what's working, what's not working? And I think if you can invest in that as a younger or A greener sales rep with the marketing team. As long as your sales rep as your sales team won't get upset at you for that. Because I have heard that relationship has been so bad sometimes that when a sales rep talks to a marketing leader their the sales rep gets their hand slapped for. For communicating with the marketing team. Which again is crazy. But it happens.

Yeah. Well, one of the. I had a conversation with another sales leader the other day who heads up the direct sales team for Amia Takara. Takara bio and they run a weekly sort of like wins meeting and it's separate from their normal team meeting but they include marketing in it. And so what they'll do is they'll rotate individual sales reps that say hey, I had success selling this product line into this customer base, whatever. And they'll share like this is working. This is the email that I use. This was the conversation that I had. This slide really resonated with them or whatever it is like whatever the things are that are working and so well, not only one are you helping other sales reps learn those skills because they would rather hear it from their peers than hear from their manager telling them what to do. So they're going to learn from that perspective. But then they have marketing in the room too. So marketing is hearing firsthand what's working from a sales perspective. And so then it gives marketing a chance to ask these questions of the sales team and vice versa, which is like, you know, because I think what ends up happening is marketing doesn't know a lot of these things are happening. Right. So imagine I'm sharing with you like hey, this particular application area worked really well. And marketing can be like oh hey, we could actually make a piece of content specific for that to help the rest of the team leverage, you know, whatever this product in this use case more effectively. So I think it's. You have to create a purposeful meeting around this that is separate from like your sales meeting. We're just talking about the numbers and I think that's what's really was really interesting to building these relationships.

The word purposeful there. Right. Like the relationship has to be purposeful. And I think that's. It's such a good takeaway from your last episode and it just to repeat it again is it if you don't have that standing meeting for that, if you don't have that communication channel, you absolutely have to build that moving forward. And again that's where if you are a leader above marketing and sales and you don't know if that meeting happens or not, that's on you. Right? Like you have to be able to set that standard. And if you're a marketing leader or sales leader, one of you has to, you know, send out the olive branch. Right? Like let, let's, let's send that out because it's only going to benefit the both of you. And I think the example that you used in terms of if you come back as a salesperson and you're kind of talking through what worked with them, the marketing team should then be looking at, okay, how can we get that information better positioned on the website? Hey, we haven't done a LinkedIn content on that topic. Do you think we could post, do you think we could do an ad campaign around this? If their brains start running with that information, it's going to make the sales team feel more confident in what's going out from a marketing perspective too. And I think that's where I think another sliver of this gap between the two comes from when sales sees the marketing that's actually out in public external marketing. The sales team is always like, that would never work at we would like.

Or when you like, you know, this isn't like at all relevant to.

Yeah, yeah, not relevant to sell to.

Right. Like those sorts of things. And so now granted, like, salespeople need to get over this too, because the way that you market and the way that you sell are very different. So like what you would be talking about in a conversation or the way I would write a prospecting email, like those things are substantially different than how you would create an ad or how you would do a marketing email. Right. Like they're very different things. And so also I think sales people need to get over themselves and thinking that they know everything and that they think they know everything is best as well.

Well, and some of that goes to, some of that goes back to the goals and the strategies. Right. And we were big believers in the different touch points within a marketing program. Right. Like an integrated program, you're going to have all these different things. And one of the, the campaigns that we run a lot of is kind of that account based targeting. And you know, ABM is that hot button topic. And we talked a little bit about this on, on the Score podcast last week. In terms of, I believe that account based marketing is actually a sales driven and sales led thing. But if we're running a paid campaign and we're just targeting the top 100 companies, top 150 companies in our target market, we're running ads and we're doing retargeting on those individuals. That's more often than not a pure play brand awareness thing. Like we're not trying to get leads from that necessarily within the first six to 12 months, you have to really build that foundation for that type of an ad campaign. And so a lot of times we're seeing this and the sales team will have complaints about, I thought we were running the ad campaign. You know, where are the leads? I see those ads out there. Those aren't going to a form fill. That's not going to come to me. And it's like, well, that wasn't the point of that. The reason we were doing that is to try to get our brand name out there a little bit more. We're trying to get education on our value proposition, on our solutions. And so again, I think some of that comes from just the lack of communication and integration between our strategies and a sales team. Strategies as well.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, again, right. If marketing is trying to create brand awareness, sales is trying to generate sales today. Right. Like those things don't necessarily go hand in hand at the same time.

Yeah.

And so to your point, expectations have to be set appropriately.

Right.

Okay. So first step is setting the correct objectives. Right. So, so how do we go about doing that? How do we think about goal setting, objective setting to align these teams together to either solve a toxic relationship or preventing one performing?

Yes. Yeah, I think that's it's a good way to, to word that is we're trying to prevent this from happening. So I think to speak to our structure and really what I believe in is starting at revenue and working backwards. So let's say, and I think we work at score a lot in the services side of the life sciences, but then that's going to be different if we're working with a product company or if you're working with somebody that has different business units. Right. And you're across the board. And so if you take any of those examples, what's the overall revenue for, for next year? What's the goal for 2025? How is that changing from 2024 if we were a $50 million company or we're expect to be a $50 million company in 2024. And we know that goals are really aggressive right now. And so most of the companies that I'm talking to when they're talking about 2025 are telling me we need a 15, we did 20, 30% increase in revenue. Okay, well where is that increase in revenue going to come from? Which business unit, which product line, which service is that revenue going to come from? If as a marketing leader or as a sales leader, you are setting your objectives for the year without having that clarity from the leadership team, the executive team, whoever sets those goals, you might as well stop what you're doing right now, calmly demand clarity or post your, post your job on LinkedIn that you're looking for, for another job, because setting yourself up for success is not going to happen there at all.

Yeah, I mean, I've even seen it though, where, you know, somebody will concoct some absolutely ridiculous revenue targets and it's typically around a new product or a new product launch where they're like, oh yeah, this product is going to take off and there's literally no track record of seeing it be successful. And that sets. So like, let's say, let's say you do that, right? You've done that. You have this like quoted quote, revenue number for this product service, et cetera. So you go off on this wild goose chase to go after it now and it's like, well, it wasn't quite as hot of a product as we thought. And so now the plan has to shift. Everybody goes back into firefighting mode. Sales is doing sales activities, marketing is doing marketing activities. And they're not talking because they're trying to just save their ass. So, so how do we ensure then that those goals are even set appropriately at that level?

So really, really good question, really good example. And I also think like, that company's probably not going to make it. But let's, let's say that they have a goal that's $25 million more than it was the year before. Let's say we're trying to jump from 50 to 75 million. What we need to look at first is do we have a big enough base from the sales database and the marketing database to even make up for that? Are we really well known, but we just haven't sold the way that we have? Are we really well known and we're growing the sales team or maybe we have more capacity at our manufacturing house than in years past. What is the difference maker in this? 25 million? Because if we aren't well known and what we see we a lot with our clients is they've gotten to 30 million and they've gotten to 30 million or 50 million because the founder has the best network of all time and they've gotten to 30 million by repeat customers and they've gotten to 30 million by referrals. If you're trying to go from 30 to 100 million and your database is current customers, past customers and referrals, then we're in a lot of trouble. Right. But if we can understand that, that means we're going to have to do a lot of brand and value education on the marketing side. And so we're going to have to do a lot of that brand awareness and brand nurturing in order to get some qualified opportunities for the sales team. So this is speaking specifically on the marketing side for this segment here, but if we get that goal, the first step for both the marketing and the sales leader is how are we going to get to that number? And if there's not a very clear answer, which usually. Right. Harrison. There's not a, oh, we'll just do this and it's going to be the trick or we've got the new product. It will, it will solve all of those problems. Right now we need to link in together. And this is where that alignment to get to that next 25 million or next growth phase between the marketing and business development development team is so essential. And this is where I think that this is a little bit controversial because I've gotten yelled at for saying it, but to me, that number is a shared revenue number. That number is a responsibility that marketing owns and that the sales team owns. So that way when marketing comes back, they're not going to say, we are responsible for 1000 form fills in 2025 and that sales is responsible for 25 million of it.

Yeah. Yes. Because I could shove them because they weren't good enough.

Correct. Right. And so when you set, when you set the revenue goal for each team, now I've seen it work both ways where you actually split it like 12 and a half and 12 and a half for 50% type of thing. I personally, I think it's just the revenue number. There's not a percentage share between the two. It's. We are both working towards that goal. If a marketing, if a marketing lead comes in and a sales team closes it, why are we, why are we bitching about who gets the ownership?

Attribution is attribute. I mean, attribution is like, well, yeah, it's a ridiculous topic for another day. And yeah, and fighting over attribution, like, I've seen it where companies will say they'll try and break out like where opportunities come from specifically, which is like, you probably good thing to do. But then there's like a fight over like, well, this was sales outbound or this was marketing inbound, or this was like attributed to like a sales development rep versus an account manager. And then you would just end up in these battles over, like, attribution. And then your sales leadership and marketing leadership team are like trying to manufacture, I don't want to say manufacture data to make them look good, but it's kind of.

It is. Right.

And then it's like just so, just so you don't get those stupid questions from, from some of the leadership team. Right.

So 100%. So I, and I, I, I get the attribution, love for me. Attribution, Attribution should be used to identify where you can find the best clients, not who gets credit for the sale.

I like that.

And, and we use. Trade shows are a perfect example. You walk up to somebody at a trade show and you're a sales rep and you're like, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna introduce myself to them. And you have a conversation and then nine months later you close a deal with them. Okay, you did a great job. You did everything that you're supposed to do. But they follow you on LinkedIn and they attended a LinkedIn Live of yours three years ago.

Like, or, or you get the badge scan. And so it's attributed to the marketing. Marketing. Yeah, right. Like, but it's like, but it really doesn't matter. It's like we went to this event and it was a touchpoint because they also follow us on LinkedIn. You know, they're all already doing this virtual event with the download a piece of content. Right. The whole point is we want to surround these people and every possible to try and close deals together as a team.

And if you don't think that from the time that your first touch point happened at the trade show, even if that was the first touch point to the time that they close, they haven't been on your website, they haven't been on your LinkedIn. Like, that's all it is. Right.

And it's probably not the first time. If they're coming to your, if they're coming to you at a trade show, it's probably not the first time they've ever heard of you.

Right?

Most likely. Right. They probably are like, I mean, if there's a hundred booths at an event, most people are just walking around to every single booth. Right, right, right.

So I, I, like, I'm so glad you brought up the attribution because I think that goes back to that revenue goal and I think that goes back to the silos that are created. That, that's the, I was going to say the number one argument. But I do think the number one argument is the. Is the shitty leads. Is that. I think that's the. I think that's.

That's the. The symptom, I think. Yes. Right.

Yes.

Symptom.

That's a great way to word that.

You get the stuffy nose when you're sick. But like, you know, that's not, you know, the root cause of the.

Correct. Yes. I love that. And so I think. So if we've identified that there's this gap that we have to go get and we can align, and a lot of times we have to tell our contact who are chief marketing officer, director of marketing, you know, chief revenue officer, that they need to, again, I always go back to this, calmly demand clarity. But they need to calmly demand that it's a shared revenue. That it. Like if that's not how they were given the number, push back a little bit, see what room is there. Because you want to be able to work together. If you're working together. That weekly meeting, the meeting that I have after this at the top of the hour is a meeting with our marketing team to talk about our deals from last week. To talk about our meetings from last week. What's worked. Hey, what information do I need in my proposals? Hey, this thing really worked here. I'd like to have that in the proposal. If we weren't working to the same goal, that meeting gets canceled at least. At least every other week. Right. If not, if not every time, you.

Don'T have it probably at that point. Right. It's a KPI meeting where you're just showing your metrics scenario numbers. Yeah. Marketing's got their presentation. Sales is their presentation.

Yeah. Which again is. And I think, I think a lot of this goes back to the story that you. That you're telling in internally. Right. Is you have to start at the. The top. And so anytime that we do reporting, I'm starting at the story. And I'm going back to the strategic direction that we set eight months ago. I'm going into the goals that we set, and then I'm going to the outcomes that have happened. And then for some meetings, I'll show the output. Right. Like, I'll show how we got there, but that's another big avenue. We talked about metrics a little bit earlier and things like that is outcomes versus output. And when there is that silo. And I'm a marketer at heart who has a Director of Business Development title. So marketing teams, if you hear this, don't be mad at Me. But both teams, to be fair, show output more often than not. Right.

Like, how is the sales doing? Right. Or how many. Yeah, it's the same thing, right?

Yeah. In every way.

We said 10,000 emails.

Yeah. It's like, okay, I, we. And it's again, we fall into this trap too. You have a bad month and so if I have a bad prospecting month or if I don't have a good 90 day out pipeline, I might panic on a Tuesday and I might just go and connect with everybody I can on LinkedIn and send 62 things that I'm trying to call and then I'm like, wow, that was a really productive day and nothing's gonna come of that. Right. Like, maybe you get lucky, but it's a panic play. And marketing teams, I think internally, when there's not that alignment and there's not that strategic direction, you get into that shiny object. Because a salesperson or a chief scientist, officer, scientific officer might call and say, we should do this, we should do this, we should do this. And the next thing you know, you're running all over the place. And we're not going back to that true direction or that true north that we had set at the beginning of the year.

Awesome. So what I'm getting here is, yeah, all level at the top level, we're talking how we can align the teams around one goal, whether it be bookings, revenue, however you define the most important, you know, metric for your org, and then both teams are working towards that. But then you have to understand what are the expectations for product lines, for business units, for geographies within that. Then you have to like allocate your resources appropriately to that where then you can start to decide now, how are we as a team going to hit these goals together, which then would ultimately roll into the tactics that you would then deploy. Right?

Yeah. And, and you should just snippet that and send it to the world and say this all you have to do to solve these problems. And I have a weekly meeting. Yes. And have a weekly meeting. And, and I say that and I, and I joke, but I also kind of mean it because when you got to the end there, you said, and then it's the tactics. Right. And what more often than not happens as going back to the beginning of our conversation is you start this planning and it's just going to be what trade shows are we going to, what updates are we making to the website, and then how often are we going to post on LinkedIn? And maybe on the sales side, it's a list of competitor or list of target companies. Maybe you have that broken out into tiers, but a lot of times I've just seen it as outputs. How many, you know, how many calls do we want to make? How many shows are we going to go to? How many meetings do we need? And it's like, well, where did we get that meeting number from? Do we have that meeting number as it pertains to the revenue number? And are we working backwards from there? And how does that come from marketing? And if we don't have those things, we don't have what you just laid out, then. Yeah, in four months you're going to be really pissed off at your marketing or sales counterparts. There's no denying that.

Yeah, 100% so. Well, I think also too, I mean, the other thing that I think this does is it can help prevent some of these like ways that you can game the system, which is marketing needs to hit a monthly, you know, marketing qualified lead number. You could just run ads to a gated ebook and, you know, drive leads that way as an easy app. There's like all these tactics that you could play there. And then even on the sales side, you know, I can go make a bunch of ghost dials to a bunch of fake numbers. I wanted to wrap up my, you know, activity numbers. Right. So there's all of these games that you can play. And so if you set the wrong incentives and you set the wrong objectives that aren't relevant, you, you know, that's where the problems present themselves.

Yeah. And I think that goes back to, you know, I, I think I'm a broken record when I say this, but marketing's job is to support revenue and sales's job is to support revenue. And if we don't have that, if we don't have that centered, there's going to be pitfalls throughout the entire year. So refocus it to. Marketing's job is to support revenue. Sales job is to support revenue. How do we support revenue together? And you'll definitely be more successful.

Cool. And so as teams are thinking about their planning now because they're definitely thinking about planning now because you're talking about it and you're going to remind them all the time. So start your 2025 planning soon. @ least start having these conversations especially around goals and objectives. Right. If it's something that you really want to, you know, make a change on, you know, start having this conversation to talk about resetting how you are comped your different objectives that you may have. And if You're a founder, CEO listening to this and you want to have a better relationship between your sales and marketing teams. You should be thinking about how you drive this sort of behavior down through those organizations as well.

Yeah. In every, in, in every way. I think that's, that it's a really good finishing note and a good takeaway because that, that if it doesn't start now, it'll be December and you'll say it's too late, we'll look at it next year and then we'll be in pain throughout all of 2025 as well.

Yeah. 100%. So awesome. Alec, this has been great. One last question for you though. So I know we wanted to talk about some bad prospecting takes and so I'm sure you've got a couple but hit us with a rapid fire a couple bad takes on prospecting for people to avoid.

Yeah, I, I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep this as, as, as PG as I can. If you don't like prospecting, you should not be in sales. Right. Like I think that that is, it's a non negotiable for me if you, if you cannot prospect, you do not belong in, in sales. If however you want to prospect and you are not sure who to prospect, it is a failure at the top level of your sales team, your marketing team and your overall organization. And this is the take that gets me in the most amount of trouble is if you do not have an ICP that is narrowly or at least defined in a certain area to let your sales team go and prospect efficiently, your sales team won't want to work there. And I've seen this too often where we will work with somebody and their, their, their audience is all of large biotech, oh small to medium biotech. And it's like everybody, there's no specific.

Person that they've highlighted here.

That's everybody that you're not. If you hire a sales team member and you tell them to go and do this, they are not going to come back and be happy. They are not going to be, to be successful.

Or you assume that they can figure it out on their own. Right. It's like that's not like yeah, so senior somebody is like they still need to be, you know, shown the way that you have built the company around which is the right ideal customer profile to target who to go after when how, what resonates like that's what you put together in a playbook to honor.

I think that and the playbook word and I go back to it. I said it too many times, but the calmly demanding clarity is really hard for younger sales team members. But if you are hired at that level and you don't have that education. I say the same thing for marketing teams, actually. If you're on the marketing team and you don't know that, go to your director, to your boss, or to the leadership team if you have that, you know, access and ask them what makes our best clients. Not only kind of the, the behavior, like the demographic geographic type stuff and the roles, but also what type of a position were they in in their business. Were they coming off of a growth? Were they coming. Where are they trying to rebound from, you know, a couple of bad years? What made them choose your organization so you can start to get some of those intangible or intrinsic value parts of why somebody chooses you. Because that's going to be more lethal in prospecting, I guess I would say it's more lethal in quality prospecting to me than it, than it is, you know, in anywhere else in the sales cycle too.

People don't hate prospecting emails. They hate shitty, unpersonalized, unrelevant prospecting emails. Right?

Yeah.

If I sent you the perfect message to solve your problem at this exact moment, you'd be thanking me. You said, thank you so much for reaching out. I would love to talk. People love prospecting emails, but they hate shitty ones. So something to keep in mind.

You quoted Dave Gerhardt on the episode last week. And I always go back to him. Like, everybody tells me, email sucks, email sucks, email sucks. And then Dave has like nine episodes in a row where he's like, email's the best that we've ever had. And he's like, I write my emails, I do it myself. And it's personable and it's, I bring value. I do all this email. People don't hate your LinkedIn profile. They hate your LinkedIn profile because it's bad. It's bad, right?

Like, yeah, people don't like, interact with your content because of shit. I get upset. I get upset when I put a post out there and it doesn't get anything. And I'm just like, man, not supposed to be bad. I thought it was good. No, your quality, your results are the quality of what you're putting out there.

So, so yes, could not agree more with that. And, and, and people want, people want solutions to the problems that they have. And, and if you can find that, you will win.

Yeah. And reps want an easy button to do that. Right. They want to. I'VE been using the term spam cannon a lot lately. And so, yeah, like, most reps just want to load up. They just want to load up the spam cannon. You know, put that template in there, load up a list, hit send all, and then, you know, hope for the best. Right. It's like, why that doesn't work. But, yeah, put away the spam cannon. Put it down.

Yes. I love that. I love that. That's awesome.

Well, Alec, this has been great. Lots of good stuff in here for leadership to be considering, and hopefully we see a lot less toxic relationships coming from marketing sales in the next few months. So thanks for coming on.

Absolutely. Thank you. Ra.