Competitive Collaboration: Necessary Friction Between Sales & Marketing | Gregg Ames - 1571

An alignment between sales and marketing inspires the competitive collaboration needed to develop consistent business growth that is scalable across the departments of the organization. In today’s episode of The Sales Evangelist Donald is joined by Gregg Ames, CCO of Act-On Marketing Automation, to discuss his take on building a proper sales and marketing alignment.

Great solutions occur when sales and marketing stop acting as separate processes. 

• Companies start fragmented. Sales and marketing do their things, but unifying the entire sales funnel leads to a guide for better messaging. 
• People process information with technology, and that behavior has not shifted. That processing starts with an integrated flow between departments. 
• Every company has good salespeople. But, when equipped with marketing to canvas a broader market, brings more high-quality leads to allow a focus on later-stage selling.
• Sellers are (historically) not great at generating demand. Getting marketing to take this role will bring more revenue to the organization

How sellers can help with the alignment:

• Many have seen some semblance of a unified sales and marketing process, and whether it’s through your ideal profile or not, you need to create feedback loops. 
• People need to drive communication upstream; you can’t have the left and right hands be completely uncoordinated.
• Receiving constructive feedback is necessary to properly learn from past mistakes. However, it’s also critical for the company to invest in the seller’s knowledge.
• Everything starts with a proper ICP. If marketing’s leads aren’t the right fit and converting sales, the team needs to reiterate their messaging or scoring methodology to avoid false positives from proliferating.

Three implementation times for inter-departmental unification: 

• When driving sales and marketing alignment, be prepared to plan and evolve your program. You have to access where you are in the organization and understand how it might change in the future.
• Leveraging data is paramount to a successful program. Marketing is no longer just art; it’s art and science. Leverage data to build a repeatable process that decisions are based on.
• Determine where deals stall, and where wins are created - when you integrate the marketing stacks in the conversation, there’s data about site intent, nurture potential, and A/B testing to quality people more quickly. 

If you look at these elements, you’ll be successful.

Create feedback loops, which can be small email or slack technologies, or well-structured interval meetings between relevant parties.

AE working for an organization - how to implement?

We’re chasing numbers, so it’s important to measure good metrics to hit the proper revenue targets. However, we’re not as comfortable talking with our teams and having earnest discussions about the high-level air cover or ABM strategies that should be the next customers.

Initiate dialogues with peers to at least establish a strategy that will move the organization closer to the desired outcomes.

Gregg’s final takeaway? Embrace your marketing team, because it’s much easier to win as a team when sales and marketing are properly aligned. Email Gregg at gregg.ames@act-on.com or connect with him on LinkedIn for more interesting and relevant sales content.

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This episode is brought to you in part by Skipio.

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As one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey. We’d love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or Spotify. Audio provided by Free SFX, Soundstripe, and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and Produced by Brightseed and Hill.

Mentioned in this episode:

HubSpot and bluëmago | STUDIOS

HubSpot and bluëmago | STUDIOS hubpspot.com/marketers bluemangostudios.com