Sales Benchmark Index: Mike Drapeau, on Uniting Sales and Marketing Departments

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Mike Drapeau of SBI (Sales Benchmark Index) joins us to share practical ways companies can address the disconnect between sales & marketing.

Danny:

Hey, so let’s go ahead and jump in today’s episode. I’ve got Mike Drapeau here from SBI. Mike, thank you so much for coming and joining. Mike’s a great friend. But for those who don’t know you or SBI, tell us about you.

Mike:

Thank you, Danny. So, again, my name is Mike Drapeau. I’m a partner at SBI. SBI is a management consultancy focused on sales and marketing, on revenue growth. And our mission in life is to work with our clients to help them improve their top line, and to do so via initiatives and projects, and the sales, marketing, customer success, and customer experience functions. So thanks, Danny.

Danny:

Awesome, so it looks like you have a little bit of experience at this.

Mike:

A little bit yeah.

Danny:

So, to say the least. But what we were talking about, what are the big challenges that we hear all the time for not just manufacturers but across the board, but still, it applies, is this misalignment between sales and marketing. And it’s a big challenge. What are some of the key missteps that you see on how people are kind of missing the mark? What does that look like so we can kind of lay that foundation?

Mike:

Well, gosh, we could have a show that lasts 10 hours on that topic.

Danny:

I’m sure.

Mike:

We really could. And for those out there in the marketing function or leading marketing functions, I’m going to kind of speak to you all because there’s a unique opportunity for you to really drive the engagement you have with your parallel Chief Sales Officer. So many marketing officers, especially those at around my age, have come into that from the B2C function. They’ve been classically trained, price, product, position, place, and that is completely antithetical even, there’s no way for a salesperson to understand that. And so there’s a language barrier that causes a complete inability to talk. Also, many marketing leaders don’t understand the coin operated, day-by-day, quarterly ability to hit numbers. And so they don’t have a number.

So the second fault line is when we work with, especially industrial companies, we give, we ask the marketing person, what’s their number? First question, they don’t have a number. So putting that number together so that both share it, that’s what we call revenue marketing. So revenue marketers walk into every meeting with the Chief Sales Officer understanding, “Hey, I own a number, and the number can be defined various different ways.” Let’s say, for instance, the number of net new leads generated in a buying persona that are not part of the existing sales go-to market. So that’s a way for a marketing person to say, “Hey, I’m going to owe you 10 of those each month,” each quarter, whatever, and that then becomes something that we can rally around.

Same thing with campaigns. Sales leaders don’t understand campaigns. It’s sort of voodoo. Marketing puts the campaign out and suddenly leads fall from the sky. We don’t know…we know that’s not real. So when we work with CMOs we make sure that they give a role. Every marketing campaign, every single one, should have a role for the salespeople, sales manager, and sales rep. And literally giving them the scripts, giving them the custom emails, giving them the text message content that they need to send so they can play their role in the campaign, and then it occurs to them, “Oh, that brand message, that video, that value statement, that’s connected to the campaign where I was given, that I’m supposed to execute with five or six or 10 of my clients.” So that ability to connect the tissue.

And the last thing I would say is personas. So every marketing leader knows about personas. They kind of erupted 20 years ago through the agency interaction and through making sure that content advertising was created and aligned to an individual, great. And they were never ever used by the sales force. It was literally a construct that was limited to just a handful of people in the marketing department. Useful for them but utterly useless beyond that. So one of the things that we do is we use the persona as a connecting tissue. It’s a way to draw both parties into the conversation and own, jointly own the persona. So it’s not just so that you can create content against it. It’s also so that you can inform your sales process.

So for instance, the persona is integrated into the sales process. So it’s literally, if I’m a sales rep, and I’m going to go have a call. Then one of my motions, my internal motions is break out the persona, sit down with my sales manager, make sure I understand the fears, the values, the ideas, the messages of the persona, and I look at my presentation I’m going to give. Does it include those things? Yes or no? What are my objectives of the call? Do the objectives of the call meet with what the persona is likely to want? And just that level of tangibility to the persona makes them so much better. And then the content that comes out from marketing slips right into the salesperson’s bag in a much more effective way than it used to.

Danny:

Right, no that makes a lot of sense. For someone- dialing in on a couple things… So let’s talk about, you were talking about the number. Having your KPI or whatever, why do you think that’s not a thing?

Mike:

Well I think because most marketing people, especially in the industrial sector, have not grown up through their career being held accountable for production. And yes, you have to have a correct video, you have to have a good piece of content, or you have to have a campaign that has an architecture to it, yes that, but not an actual number. And the fault line for this has been the whole who owns the lead development rep group. So it usually… it started off in the marketing department, because it was sort of an outgrowth of, “Hey, I’ve got leads, they’re not ready for sales, what do I do with them? I’m going to have some human middle-ware to try to massage them and nurture them.” And then the salespeople saw that, and that’s very much a numbers business. And they saw the marketing person not really doing a good job managing that, so, “I’m going to take it.” In those cases where the sales leader had that authority they did, but then rapidly degenerated into an appointment setting group, which is the antithesis of what you want for lead development rep, which is long relationships, complex sales, stimulating a thought of a prospect or a client. And so it became, it then suddenly became ineffective, and then suddenly it was killed.

So what’s happening now is because there’s more and more Chief Marketing Officers, or VPs of Marketing who are revenue marketers and they understand this, and they have begun to understand the need to manage quantitative people in their business, that they’re now taking this function back. And the complexity and the sophistication of the tools that are being used and the processes that are being used, and even the platforms, the social platforms, that are all being pulled into the LDR. That LDR actually becomes a strategic resource. It used to be thought of as the lead development rep is the least important, most tactical, most sort of you-can-fire-them-in-a-moment person. They’re actually now the opposite, because they’re your over-the-horizon targeting. They’re listening to the market, they’re hearing what clients, or not really clients, prospects are saying way before the sales rep. All the self-serving that’s going on out there where buyers are self-serving themselves, that’s happening, the rep doesn’t know. And the LDR, though, is getting in that conversation. They’re introducing themselves into the thought stream of a potential buyer. And so they’re collecting, “What are they thinking? What are their impressions? What are new changes to the market? What’s the customer saying-” Or, I’m sorry, “…the competitor saying or doing?” And so they become- our recommendation, because they’re so strategic to our clients, is: don’t ever outsource that. That’s the crown jewels. And not only have that person and enable them with technology to process, but use them as a competitive weapon, right?

Danny:

Absolutely, yeah. Well they’ve got their ear to the ground, like you mentioned there. And so, I mean that, if you’re doing it right, is going to feel, what you talked and mentioned before, the personas. So we understand what those challenges are. Not just like, your target market of, you might traditionally think, “Oh well, male, female, age, whatever.” No, it’s getting into the pains, the challenges. This person, what are their fears? Well their fears, they want to make that next promotion. Or whatever.

Mike:

Absolutely.

Danny:

How do we help them solve that challenge? Not just sell more or whatever.

Mike:

Absolutely.

Danny:

So let’s talk a little bit about the next step which you’re talking about with the campaigns and making sure that those were integrated in a sense that we are aligned, that it’s a cohesive effort, ’cause right now it’s, or a lot of times, marketing is thought of as, “Okay, go do the flyers and the brochures, and the trade show booths.”

Mike:

Right. “And then get out of the way.”

Danny:

Right exactly. “We’re going to sell it,” whatever. Versus saying, “Hey, we’re going to do this whole campaign that’s aligned with the whole sales coordinated effort.” And providing, I think you mentioned, those messages, those scripts. “Here, text them, text them this. Here’s the sequence or the cadence that we’re going to have.” Because now we understand what those challenges are and those pains versus we’re just going to put this out there. I think it leads back to that challenge thing, not having that accountability initially where marketing before was just awareness. “We’ve got to get our…the more we see our brand out there, that means we’re doing a good job.” Can’t really measure that. “We must be doing well, so…”

Mike:

“All good!”

Danny:

Yeah! Right? How do you, for maybe an organization that is not doing that right now, what were some practical steps you’d say, “Hey, be thinking about with your, having a coordinated campaign,” what are those first steps that you would recommend them taking?

Mike:

Well, there’s two ways to go on that, I think, in terms of if you’re saying, hey, I was VP of Marketing, I’ve inherited an organization that’s not really maybe sophisticated, that’s doing things the old school way. All right, so you can take two paths. The first path would be, “I’ve got a set of large customers, probably the majority of my revenue, but a few number them,” right? And let’s say the revenue’s declining of those, where it’s stable, it’s not increasing, I need to do more there. So you have a limited subset. We would call that a working prototype of clients, of customers, and you direct marketing via something like account-based marketing, ABM, you’ve probably done shows on that.

Danny:

Little bit.

Mike:

Yeah, okay, so yeah, so you have this small universe, highly important universe, and you have an incredibly stylized, customized, specific detailed one off. So every single marketing campaign is specific to the customer. They may have an overall theme that they share, but it’s complete customization, and you get a couple of the reps, and maybe not all of them because some reps are just going to be dug in, they’re not going to want to play. So you need to make sure that the rep involved with the account is willing to participate in the campaign, and that you go that way and you can see results. And with all these results you’re looking for leading indicators of adoption. You’re not looking for revenue right away because you’re not going to get it. And in addition, and this is the big one for the CEO, is you’re never going to get a situation where a sales rep raises his hand and says, “Hey, that piece of business was won by marketing.” Right? It’s just not going to happen. So you have to have the belief, the understanding, as long as you’re a revenue marketer, that this collaborative effort, this coordinated effort, which is meant to have an impact on lead gen, is a shared responsibility.

And by the way, you want it to funnel through the sales rep. You want to make the sales rep elemental to the customer, and that’s a way for you to differentiate your product and services through the sales rep and the interaction you’re having. But they become armed with better content, better messaging, better ideation. In some cases people call that commercial insight. And all of that is meant to then give you the edge, maybe create a new piece of demand that wasn’t there before or give you the edge in an ongoing competition for maybe something structured. So that’s the ABM route. The other route is sort of the path not traveled. So a lot of times in sales forces you’ll have sort of wizened old dogs, the legacy reps, they own the majority of the revenue, they’ve been in the saddle for 20, 25, even 30 years. And they’re just not going to change. Why? Because they see no reason to. And there’s some legitimate reason for that.

Danny:

Sure.

Mike:

But then you have the up-and-comers. Either maybe some people retire and they have a new sales rep or you’re trying to expand in the new go-to market or a new geo or sector, you have new reps. And those are kind of younger-ish typically. Maybe in their 30s or 40s, because they need some sector experience, but you want some runway in their career. They’re going to be, by virtue of their age and their newness to the company, they’re going to be more open to embracing sort of this marriage of digital technologies and face-to-face go-to market. So, in those cases you’re looking for that’s your defined group, the newish sort of employee. And to have a bit of a blank slate, typically. You might get some inherited accounts, but they probably have a patch that includes a lot of prospects.

And now you have, you can pretty much say to yourself, “Hey look, this is working. Previous new reps, here’s how long they took to onboard. Here’s how long it took them to bring new accounts in and whatever, here was their average revenue per year or per quarter. These new reps are using these new marketing technologies and approaches, much more.” And that’s usually what convicts people. And when we talk to folks, unless there’s a massive customer bleed we say don’t go the ABM route, because you’ve got too much headwinds with your own sales force. Go this other sort of customer marketing route with newer people, and then when that shows evidence of working, and it will, now you have the prima facie case to move over into the rest of the organization.

Danny:

Once you’ve made that… I guess, maybe making that transformation a little bit, moving, so THEN? That’s interesting, okay.

Mike:

Correct.

Danny:

Interesting. So what you were touching on about, sort of the aging workforce, you’ve got sort of two different camps. It’s interesting, there was a study that Google, when we talk about this in IndustrialSage all the time, there’s a study that Google came out with, this is 2015, so bear in mind that’s four, maybe five years ago

Mike:

Almost five years ago.

Danny:

Depending on when that was released. But they said, back then they said nearly 50% of B2B buyers were millennial. Whether that was influencers of the decision or the actual decision maker. Obviously, that was four or five years ago. I think I can do math. I think that that number I think it’s going to increase.

Mike:

Yeah, think so.

Danny:

I’m gathering that. So that’s a really big challenge that we hear all the time on here: “How do I have that transfer of knowledge? How do I…” I think a lot of people are trying to change, I don’t want to, uh…you mentioned these, the ‘old dogs’ or whatever?

Mike:

Yeah.

Danny:

Listen…

Mike:

I’m one, so…

Danny:

Then I can’t say that.

Mike:

No you can’t. I can.

Danny:

But there’s a lot of resistance to change, and I totally get it. You said there’s for sure some legitimacy there.

Mike:

Sure, yeah.

Danny:

Big time, big time. But there’s this gap between, you hear a lot with CRM, oh a lot of our subscribers either don’t have CRM or they’re bringing it in and they’re like, “Oh, well, you know, that’s such a huge challenge. How do we get people in to do all this?” And it totally is, but then there’s this whole transfer of knowledge and there is some legitimacy in the sense of saying well wait a minute, all these new tools. All the sales automation and all of these great things aren’t necessarily, that’s not, what do you, what are your recommendations in terms of bringing on, you mentioned onboarding that younger generation that maybe doesn’t have as much of that industry experience.

Mike:

Wow, all right, so lots of questions there. So let me tackle the first one, which was sort of a CRM technology question. And I would say to anybody out there listening or sharing this with others, be very wary of adopting the sort of legacy cloud CRM technologies. You know what they are.

Danny:

We mention them a lot.

Mike:

Okay good, good. So be very aware, not just because of the expense. Much less so, because they do not support the convergence, the omnichannel convergence of information. They’re built from the ground up. In fact, for example, they have the worst lead management capability on the planet. So we all know leads are people, from the marketers out there. But you can have somebody who is the same human being who’s coming at you in five different personalities, in three different emails, some of which are anonymized, some of which are not. And you get five different leads. And even when you know they’re all the same people, bringing them together for one coherent view of the human being so that you can nurture that person effectively across the channels, impossible with legacy CRM technology. There are newer platforms right now (new, as in the last couple years) that are established and that are built from the ground up, understanding the omnichannel view.

So why does that matter? If you’re a lead development rep, forget the sales rep for a second, if you’re a lead development rep and your productivity is the number of qualified leads that I create each month in a buying persona, which is typically somebody senior, right? That’s hard. Could be two or three a month, tops. I need to have a complete holistic view of that human being. I need to know everything they’ve done, in what channel, at what time, over time, so that I can then use the best means of connecting to them and be able to draw those, kind of combine those flavors in, and then even work across the organization from Betty to Sally to John, all in the same organization, all with that omnichannel view. And when I have that I am so much more effective now, because I have a new piece of content, a video, a white paper, even a message statement. And I can now deliver that easily and see what happens in response. So often we’ll get something on a device. But then we’ll send it to some other device. Or we’ll remember it coming in as somebody else. And there’s no way to create that connecting tissue. So if you care about leads and if you care about qualified leads and if you care about the productivity of your lead development rep, then you want a platform that makes that easier. And the legacy CRM providers just don’t do that. Currently. Maybe one day in the glorious future, but not now.

So your second question was not about technology, it was more about onboarding and these new reps and how do you…there’s a gap, right? You have a 50 something year old person who’s been in the saddle for 20 plus years and you have a brand new person, 30 something, got a lot of fire and a lot of energy, not a lot of sector experience. Maybe they worked at a competitor or somebody in the general ecosystem for a while. But they don’t know anything. They don’t have product knowledge. They don’t have organizational knowledge. They don’t have competitive knowledge. They don’t have all the different things, even referential and who’s who in the zoo and the customer. Even worse, the customers out there, they may not own those relationships. So what do I do? How do I onboard that person effectively?

There’s lots of great self-service cloud tools, and if you had some form of onboarding program that’s more than just stuffing them full of product information, right? What’s the engagement strategy? Do I have some form of a mentor who’s making sure, and one of the one’s who’d been around for a while, the more seasoned folks, and have a structured mentoring program with role playing and shadowing and so forth. That’s how you get the new person up. And one of the things I’d like to say to help provide a lead indicator metric, because people focus on the lagging. How much revenue do they produce? And revenue is so lagging and it’s unfair because that new person oftentimes gets thrust into territory where they’re not familiar. So you want to say, “How do I know that they’re being successful?”

Danny:

Right, how do you measure that?

Mike:

So, one of the ways when we install onboarding, that’s one of the things we actually do, is we say, okay, the new person coming in has– I don’t know– let’s say 10 accounts, okay? So 10 accounts, and we have, there’s a buying decision team of five people, let’s say, right? All right, so that’s 10 times five is 50. There’s 50 human beings that that new sales rep has to engage with. They have to know who he or she is, and so how do I know that they’re doing the right thing? Well, probably when they arrive they’re not going to be LinkedIn connected to any of them. So now in the industrial world not everybody has a LinkedIn profile, right? Some don’t. But most do and certainly, to your point, the younger buyers do. So of the 50, maybe 45 or 40 have a LinkedIn profile. So I’m going to measure how many LinkedIn connections to the buyers, the buying decision team, does that sales rep have? Now does that mean that that’s a deal? No. Does it mean they’ve even got a qualified opportunity? No. But what it does is a proxy for ability to engage. I mean, the industrial automation, the manufacturing buyer’s kind of a crusty sort. So they’re probably not going to accept just a random LinkedIn email or connect request from a brand new sales rep. So you have to build a reason for that person to want to then say yes to your connect request. So there’s actually, it is a good proxy for selling an engagement potential.

Danny:

Yeah, absolutely, that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned, not a lot of everybody has, it’s funny, too, I mean even some of the, I’ve noticed, even some of the younger sales, by and large most of them are going to have a LinkedIn account, but there’s still a big number of, certainly in the leadership role…nope. Or you have an account, but you have like five connections, which means you’re not using it.

Mike:

Exactly.

Danny:

Okay, I’m going ask you another question. This is off, a little off-topic. I mean, it’s not off-topic, but we didn’t discuss this beforehand. I like doing this sometimes. So oftentimes with a lot of, let’s take away the industrial automation type companies away and let’s just look at the manufacturing. A lot of times, most of the time, you’re going through distributors. You don’t have that direct, you might not necessarily have that direct touch to the customer or the end user, or you may have two different degrees of separation there.

Mike:

Yep, multichannel, yep.

Danny:

So what do you do… a sales and alignment perspective, from that challenge, what are some of the recommendations that you might have relative to, “We have totally different audiences.” And maybe in a lot of cases, most cases, limited budget to be able to touch…

Mike:

How do we get there?

Danny:

Exactly.

Mike:

Right, so this issue of multichannel distribution is one we face a lot with our customers, and one of the things they find is you’ve been happy for many years, selling through partners or partners of partners and so on. One day you wake up and realize, number one, “My end user doesn’t really know me,” number one. Number two, “My sales are flat. And I can’t, I’m not successful in influencing that partner community, that sort of overall ecosystem, to prefer me. Maybe now there’s a new competitor. Maybe there’s some governmental intrusion, maybe there’s some trend out there, but whatever it is, I’m almost handcuffed.” So, when that problem is presented to us, and we’re talking with management, the only way out of that is to come up with a strategy that gets you to be able to touch or listen and learn from the end user customer and to provide information and value to those channels, those different levels of distribution. And the other way is to just cut out completely and go direct in some form or fashion.

Danny:

Whether it’s ecomm or whatever.

Mike:

Could be direct eCommerce for the lower level. It could be maybe sales reps in a new market. It even could be a form of direct through indirect. And what I mean by that is I may hire a channel partner who does the selling, but the commercial relationship requires that I get visibility through and ability connecting contact with the end user as part of the quid pro quo of them, and developing a profit through my solution. So now if you say to yourself, ‘I’m afraid of eCommerce. I’m afraid of establishing a new channel, whether it’s me direct or a different sort of channel partner that gives me visibility. I want to go through my existing ecosystem.” That’s the hardest thing to change. Why? Because there’s a real reason why you’re not able to get to the end-user. They don’t want you to. And/or there’s a competitive offering that they don’t want to tell you about because they don’t want to have an uncomfortable conversation.

And so you’re just losing by default and you don’t know it. Nobody sends you the memo and says “You lost because I’m not taking your calls anymore.” It just doesn’t happen, right? The deal doesn’t come. So the way to do that is, the one power you have is the sales reps in channel communities are by and large lazy. They want to get the most amount of money for the least amount of effort, right? Which is fine. So play to that. Play to their fundamental laziness. Give them a reason, show them that, “If you work with me on this deal or on those sorts of deals, or every deal that looks like this and some sort of use-case selling. Then I will do x for you. I will do the selling. I will take over this.”

Danny:

Make it easy.

Mike:

Make it easy. Because probably there’s some frictions that have been introduced along the way that you’re not even aware of. And one of the ways we do that is, now there’s a whole big thing on EX and CX, right? The whole experience element, customer experience. And that’s typically thought of because of the B2C model, in terms of relationship with the provider to the end user. Fair enough. But if you have this multichannel distribution, you can’t get there, then take those same CX attributes and qualities and apply them to your ecosystem, your distribution ecosystem and treat your distributor as your customer or the distributor, the reseller and distributor, both of those together, and then find out what’s truly ailing them. Now, eventually they’re going to tell you, “You’re too expensive, your product’s not good enough,” whatever whatever. And you have to feed that into your organization. But even if that’s completely true, that you are trying to merchandise an expensive product that doesn’t have the right features, you still can play upon the fundamental laziness, you can still increase your revenue share or your market share with that distributor if you deliver net new things of value.

Now people are always looking at the bottom line, and you don’t want to do something, I’m not saying take them out to an endless number of steak dinners, right? I’m talking about… their currency is time. So if you can think of a way that you can actually save time for them, an easy example is pricing configuration. One of the biggest frustrations from a distributor or channel partner is it takes forever to get a quote from. Or, “When I get the quote it’s confusing. It looks like some Byzantine organization listed and nothing makes any sense, and then I have to redo it and present it in a simple manner to the customer. I hate doing that,” right? So, or maybe billing. Maybe the way that they’re billed. Your bills are late, they’re confusing. “I have somebody from accounts receivable who’s calling me up and annoying me all the time,” and whatever it is. So you can put in some listening paths along the way with different functions to that customer or that distributor, that channel partner, and then you can transform that relationship and say “Look, hey, it’s not just about the product. It’s also about the whole relationship.” And then what that opens up is, I would like, in a certain set, I would like some access to the end users.

So SBI has several clients where we actually helped them understand that you don’t have to, it’s not, you don’t go from zero to 100. You don’t say, “I would like to talk to every end user of all your customers.” But, “There is a compelling reason to allow me to access these end users under those conditions because I can provide value. And by the way, I’ll make you look better,” because guess what? They’re competing, too. Sometimes a provider forgets that the channel partner has multiple different channel partners against which it’s competing.

Danny:

100%.

Mike:

And so they want an edge also. So you, accessing the end user, can give them the edge. As opposed to “Hey, I’m going to cut you out of the equation,” and what have you.

Danny:

That’s a legitimate fear, yeah.

Mike:

And it is, and so if you’re going to go this route you have to make it clear that this, and you can do that commercially or just through conversations and joint business planning. But “Look, hey, this is the value that me accessing the end user’s going to get you. This is how you’re going to win not just the next deal but future deals that you’re not even winning now, and let’s work it together. And you, by the way, you’ll get access to all the information that I’m getting access to. It’s not like I’m going to keep it close. But I will be able to provide you better solutions.” And by the way, that’s a great story. They’ll probably be convicted by it, but if you do that and a year later you don’t have one new product, you don’t have one new offering, you haven’t actually created any value for them. They’re going to say, “You know what? You told me your story, sounded good, where’s the there-there?” So there has to be a commitment on your side as a vendor to actually produce, to actually innovate.

Danny:

I love it, I love that because, if I could really just put it in a nutshell, “How can we make it easy to do business with us? How can we help you solve your challenge?” Because…lazy or whatever, because typically, it’s funny, a lot of the challenges and the answer you hear is, “Oh, well, we can get more business out of them if it’s based off margin. So we just need to, we’re going to-“

Mike:

Blow the margin!

Danny:

“That’s how we’re going to do it! That’s how we’re going to be able to compete. That’s it!” And that’s not, there’s so many other–

Mike:

It’s not sustainable either.

Danny:

Not sustainable at all. It’s a race to the bottom. So, anyways, well, Mike, this has been, we could probably go on for another three hours. So we might have to do this again to keep going. But I really, really appreciate you coming on. Thanks for talking to the IndustrialSage audience and sharing a lot of great, a lot of great value. There’s a lot of takeaways that I have from this. If anybody would love more information, you guys have a load of resources, where’s the best place for them to learn more about you?

Mike:

Well, I would go to… we have many properties and platforms. Easiest is to start at our website, which is www.salesbenchmarkindex.com. It’s a long domain, but the riches are there.

Danny:

It’s all good. All right, sounds good. So there’s promise.

Mike:

Thank you.

Danny:

Thank you so much for coming on.

Mike:

My pleasure.

Danny:

All right, so all right, so there you go. Man I love that episode, we talked about a lot of different things so just a couple of key takeaways that I have, I know you’re going to have a lot as well, this misalignment between sales and marketing, we talk about this all the time, Mike talked about three really key areas on how to kind of bring that together, the first one was if you or a marketing leader is making sure that you have that accountability, a number. Every campaign, everything you’re doing, making sure that you’re able to measure against that and keeping yourself and your teams accountable.

The next piece is making sure that you have connected campaigns that you are doing stuff in coordination with your sales team so it’s not just like, hey, we’re doing brochures and flyers and we’re doing things over here on our own and sales is over here, bringing that together, saying hey listen, we’re going after this segment. Here’s how you guys are going to be able to participate in this. We’re going to be able to generate leads and do these things over here. Whether that’s webinars and email campaigns and all these different things, that it’s cohesive. We’re together. And the last piece on there is really looking at personas. We talk about this all the time. Don’t forget we have a great resource that you can download on how to develop your personas, and we walk you through that. And putting all that together. And then we talked about, I don’t know, a million other things. We talked about… one of my favorite things was talking about just really solving some of that challenge of how to create more value, really, for your distributors. How to get to that end user because that’s a big thing we focus on.

So anyways, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Listen, we’d love for you to make any comments on social media, share it with a boss or a colleague who needs to hear it. If you’re not on our email subscriber list, make sure you get on there. We’ve got all kinds of resources that we’re sending out every single week that you’re missing out on if you’re just listening on iTunes or you’re even just watching the video on our website. Get on the list. So that’s it. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. Thanks so much for listening. I’m Danny with IndustrialSage, and I’ll be back next week with a really another awesome episode.

 

 

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