READ THE SHOW NOTES:
Today's episode is a little different than our professionally recorded episodes from our world headquarters in Annapolis, Maryland. We have left the sound booth and traveled to our house, where we are holed up in a room with the door closed, fingers crossed that we are not interrupted as we record this. (There two nine year old boys playing video games following a sleepover, and they are hooting and hollering as they do it, along with two new puppies that we adopted a month and a half ago probably eating the pillows in our living room as we speak!)
Kathleen's appreciating having the opportunity to shut the email off and not have a formal schedule, but it's been hard for me, with a lack of structure. I have a much more difficult time not having a routine, and I'm sure it's part personality and part ADD. I'm working. But you have to be able to shut your brain off for a while, give it the space to recharge. Then when you come back, that's when you do your most creative work, have your best ideas, and you're at your most productive.
SALES AND MARKETING ARE EVOLVING
That said, in thinking about New Year's resolutions, I had this fictitious conversation going on in my mind about the marketer and the salesperson sit down – kind of like talking to myself in my own head. Having that conversation and knowing that both sides need to continue to evolve and change to work closer together and maybe break some bad habits and maybe reach out where they need help or just improve communication and really get to that model. I think that in 2016 you're going to hear a lot about revenue teams.
Why do we need three different departments to get and keep customers – marketing, sales, and customer service? Why can't it just be one? It could be called the get and keep customers department. I am the Director of Getting and Keeping Customers! It's as simple as that.
What are you measured on? How many I get and how many I keep! Okay, so if alignment is going to be such a big topic this year and closing the gap between sales and marketing, then it seems like it would be important for the people working in those departments, until they are one department, to gain a better understanding of the others. For example, how can a marketer help a salesperson be better in their job?
HOW MARKETING CAN HELP SALES
The first thing that comes to mind is, if you're in marketing and you don't know the top three questions that I get as a salesperson, shame on you. (And sales, if you haven't talked to your marketing teams and told them, "Hey, you know what? Rather than producing a piece of collateral or something generic, these are the three questions that I get.")
"IF YOU'RE IN MARKETING AND YOU DON'T KNOW THE TOP THREE QUESTIONS THAT I GET AS A SALESPERSON, SHAME ON YOU."
This will be the year of measuring. The C-level executives, your owners, your executive team, whomever, whatever the structure is of your organization, they are going to start asking for, if they haven't already, more specific measurables that demonstrate the ROI of this marketing investment. Sales, you might think that this isn't going to affect you – that it's only marketing's neck on the chopping block – but that is not the case. Email templates can help you be more efficient in your administrative tasks, freeing you up to spend your time where you need to be.
HOW SALES CAN HELP MARKETING
So how can sales assist marketing?
Kathleen says it goes back to the very beginning. When we work with clients, one of the very first things we do with any new client that we bring on, is we create something called an audience persona, which is really a profile of the client's ideal lead.
(In sales terms, we'd call that the ideal prospect.)
Having this persona is a great way to help us make the fictitious prospect feel like a real person. We even give them a picture and a name. One of our top prospects for Quintain is a persona called Entrepreneur Edward, who is a business owner. We know what Entrepreneur Edward looks like, we obviously know his name – he's named Edward. We understand who he is, both personally and professionally, and having that very real picture of him in our head makes us more effective in crafting content that's going to resonate with Edward. Email subject lines that he's going to want to open, links that he's going to want to click on, etc.
HOW TO CREATE THE BEST PERSONAS
Where does sales come in? Well, it's impossible for marketers to create a good persona in a vacuum. Kathleen will ask clients to think of their favorite customer they've worked with. The kind of customer that, if you could clone them three times over, and work with them again and again and again, you would be thrilled. That seems to help my clients understand better who that ideal lead is.
Sales can do the same thing. Who are the top three clients they've worked with? What makes them so great? It's not always they had a big budget. It could be their attitude towards what we're selling was just really great, they got it. It could be they really had their act together and they were able to give us the information that we needed in order to put together a good proposal, or it could be they had a really good budget, they were the right size company, we were dealing with a decision-maker instead of an influencer.
There are a lot of factors, but you really have to think about what is it that makes that customer so great to you as a salesperson, and communicate that to marketing so that they can incorporate those characteristics into the development of the personas they're using for marketing.
I agree, and I'm going to add a little footnote here that as a salesperson, I don't want to disqualify people too early as I'm prospecting. It's just naturally you want to reach as large an audience as possible. If you're in marketing and you're helping, you're coming to sales and you're asking them for these characteristics, keep driving home and reminding me that this is the ideal customer, the ideal. If you had every single one of the characteristics that you're looking for, what would they be? We're not excluding prospects by making this the ideal, we're just building that perfect ideal prospect.
WHAT WE LEARNED ABOUT OUR OWN PERSONAS
What we discovered is that the perfect person or lead is really somebody C-level within their organization – an owner, a CEO, a president of a growing company – and one of the interesting traits that they had in common was that they are members of some kind of executive peer group, like Avistage, or NEO, or the Alternative Board. There are tons of them out there. All of these people that we dealt with lately who've been delightful to deal with have been members of these organizations, and it kind of got us thinking, "Why is that?"
There are many types of entrepreneurs out there. But entrepreneurs that have made that investment and that see that value are very committed to working on their business and doing what is needed to be done to make it better. When you talk about redesigning your website, when you talk about entering into a partnership with a marketing agency, that attitude of, "I know I need to invest not just the money but the time to work on my business," is such a critical success factor. That was an interesting thing that we learned.
One of the things that our director of sales, Rich McElaney always talks about is he's looking for people that know what they don't know, and that they're all right with not having all of the answers.
WHY WE VALUE CULTURE-FOCUS IN OUR CLIENTS
I also love companies that win awards, particularly awards like "The Best Place to Work" award, or the "Circle of Excellence" awards, or "Company Culture" awards. I'm always drawn to a company that sees the value in investing in their culture. Obviously we do. We have a culture code that we've published on SlideShare. (You can check it out here if you haven't seen it, or you're not familiar with what a culture code is.)
That demonstrates to me that this is a company that's in it for the long-term. That's the mentality that I need when selling inbound marketing or inbound sales training or alignment of your marketing and your sales team to the get more customers and keep more customers department. That's the mentality that really is ideal in a prospect for a company like ours.
What's great as a marketer is that everyone knows who these winners are. You win an award and it's all over the news – whether it's from Smart CEO, or we have the Business Journal, the Baltimore Business Journal nearby, or the Washington Business Journal. All these publications that give awards. The Inc. 500 or 5000. Those are published lists. Don't buy the list. Instead, flag those companies on social media and create a monitoring stream, and begin to engage with them that way.
I think that that is so key. Marketing, if you come to me with the question of, "Who would you like me to raise your visibility with?" I should be able to give you a list of prospects and ask for your help in raising the visibility. That is going to influence the people you're trying to reach within the company. It's going to get around. "Hey, Quintain commented on this. You know, they've been pretty active," and then boom, the next day, you're calling in there.
And Kathleen says if you don't have that target list, then that's kind of a red flag. I think, for sales. I would agree. That's very helpful.
Thank you for listening, and I hope that everyone listening has a fantastic 2016. I'm really excited for what it holds, and I'm really excited for the prospects of doing more with this podcast.
(Psst! Did you catch the secret NEW hashtag at the end of today's podcast? Check it out, and we'll send you free swag!)
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