What if the thing that makes some people truly great in marketing or sales is not excelling at their individual craft...alone?
In this episode of #ThoughtLeaderConversations, senior marketer executive and entrepreneur Scott Barnett why the typical separation between sales and marketing is in trouble and how to approach both people and technology in a way that will generate significant returns on the effort.
Join Roger Courville as Scott Barnett shares
- Where to begin when thinking a team approach to revenue
- Where the “old” sales and marketing model is leaving money on the table
- A nuanced way to think about ABM (account-based marketing) and ABX (account-based strategy)
- Critical ways marketers must think like salespeople
- Critical ways salespeople must think like marketers
- The ‘triple threat’ of analytics, automation, and AI (artificial intelligence)
- And more...
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Series: Thought Leader Conversations
Sponsor: V2, LLC, expert virtual and hybrid event production, www.VirtualVenues.com
Host: Roger Courville, CSP, https://www.linkedin.com/in/rogerc/
Interview Transcript:
[00:00:00] Roger Courville, CSP: What if the thing that makes some people truly great in marketing or sales is not excelling at their individual craft... alone? Well, you don't wanna miss drawing from the deep well of Scott Barnett's experience.
Hello and welcome to "Revenue Generation as a Team Sport." My name is Roger Courville, and welcome to another conversation that we call V2’s #ThoughtLeaderConversations series.
You know here that we help you reach your goals with virtual or hybrid event production related to dialing in really specific use cases with. The platform that helps you get the data, analytics and goals reached that you want. But we're not here to talk about me or us today because I've got with me a friend and someone with whom I've worked closely enough to understand that he has a deep well to draw from.
Welcome, Scott.
[00:00:53] Scott Barnett: Thank you, Roger . You've got a deep well too, I think. Maybe deeper .
[00:00:58] Roger Courville, CSP: Well, not in the way that I'm hoping that we get outta you today. Fill in a couple gaps for us. Tell us who you are and what you do.
[00:01:06] Scott Barnett: My name is Scott Barnett. I am a senior marketing leader. And I've also been a consultant. I've been an entrepreneur. I have been I've had a unique sort of set of experiences in marketing operations, marketing automation and then also starting my own company in the construction marketing space and then selling. So, that leads us to where we are today.
[00:01:33] Roger Courville, CSP: And you've been in marketing, you've been in sales, you understand tech , and of course every organization that we know on the planet has some point of disconnect between marketing and sales. So where does someone even begin when thinking about revenue generation as a team?
[00:01:53] Scott Barnett: Well, I think a lot has sort of changed over the course of the last few years as we've looked at the importance of sales and marketing alignment in terms of achieving goals.
The old model was marketing would create leads and pass them as sales and there would be this sort of neat baton handoff and then sales would hold their section of the goal. And there was a sort of very. Plan around who owned what right. But the new model seems to be shifting more towards seeing this as a team sport where marketing and sales are engaged throughout the funnel.
And marketing, for example, is doing things like talking to leads beyond the point. It becomes an opportunity. And then re-engaging with leads fold bore when they become customers, to do things like customer marketing and onboarding , and helping scale communications in the way that marketing and really only marketing can do with the tool sets that we have.
And then you look at how sales is engaged. You know, sales has always owned the number they've always had to. You know, generate their own leads and do outbound cold calling and prospecting as part of their life. And they hold that number and that responsibility. But what I think a lot of them have come to realize, I certainly did when I started My company is that you've gotta excel at some disciplines related to marketing in order to generate those leads in order , to make the progress.
And so, you for example, you know, marketing and sales both have a lot to learn from each other and should work together in terms of figuring out who to target, who to put on the list of accounts, for example, that they're gonna go after together. That's, that's a key area where, you know, we sort of need to work together.
And I think where this convergence is kind of happen, .
[00:03:51] Roger Courville, CSP: Yeah. I love the fact that in addition to large corporate experience, you also have that entrepreneurial perspective, which is like, yo we're all on the same team. I remember when we co-founded a i, I was co-founder of a company that we co-founded when I left Microsoft.
And because the CEO was of kind of a sales mindset, quite literally 20% of every senior executive's income was tied to the. , so we're all in. That's right. We're all in sales. , regardless of whether you got ops or marketing or whatever. So just outta curiosity, since, yeah, since a lot of probably who's listening here.
Might be dialed in because they are dealing with that because it is just so common. Let's look at each side of the equation. Sure. How do we start with marketing? What are some things that marketing professionals could learn from sales, if not from doing sales?
[00:04:53] Scott Barnett: Yeah. I mean, this is sort of how I, I progressed into this, so I was in marketing most of my life and had a big sort of shock when I.
Thrown into the sales world, starting my own company and learned a lot. I think I'm actually a better marketing person now as a result of having that experience. And you know, to give you an example, you know, back when I was in marketing, you know, we, we focused on things like. Let's create the super comprehensive mother of all PowerPoint decks that's got a hundred slides in it, and let's march that into into the sales demos and let's present that.
And, and very quickly you kind of learn that's not gonna work in a real, in a real sales world. If you walk in with a super long demo, Don't spend any time exploring or investigating what's going on with the client. Don't understand their pain points. You're gonna get tossed out of the room pretty quick.
What, and
[00:05:55] Roger Courville, CSP: If you don't think I'm cool, let me just show you some more call. I call that on
[00:06:01] Scott Barnett: slide 77, you're gonna be convinced . .
[00:06:04] Roger Courville, CSP: Exactly. And by the way you should go follow Scott on on LinkedIn and he goes into more detail in one of one of his many insightful posts there. So flip, flip that around and I'm curious your perspective on what sales could learn from marketing, because that's actually how I ended up there.
I went from carrying a bag to being in marketing and then, and I went the, I had the opposite path from you how many decades ago. But what could sales. Learn from marketing?
[00:06:41] Scott Barnett: Well, I think, you know, one of the key things that sales can learn from marketing is really starting to research the target more understand who they're putting into their pipeline as a potential deal.
One of the places where sales gets to be super strategic is where they put their time. Right? Right. So, Mark Hunter who's one of the guys that I follow religiously, who's a sales influencer, talks. How time is the most precious commodity for a salesperson and how they invest their time will generate their results.
And so if, for example they have bad targeting they will not meet their number, they won't have the right folks in there. And marketing spends an incredible amount of time focusing on targeting. They spend a lot of time identifying who is the ideal client persona? Who fits that what c.
You know, make the right amount of revenue who looks like my existing customers, right? And so if you're in marketing, you have to develop that discipline, and that's all stuff that sales could be really well served by.
[00:07:49] Roger Courville, CSP: You know what? Mark Hunter's a rock start and you should go and follow Mark Hunter too.
He is actually a friend of mine. I know. Mark. Is he? I should have, I should. I should have him on the show. Yeah, I know I'm from the professional speaking world, but, you know, connecting the dots, something that you said a little bit earlier about kind of the old way of doing things really touches with what you were just saying what sales needs to grow into. And that was the shock that I had, right? Because in that old model as here's the marketing qualified lead and the sales qualified lead, and when is it cleanly handed over? And I just remember salespeople just having one of two things. I don't have enough leads or these leads are crap.
Right. And there was just in the siloed world, that was like, it was all on marketing to just hand me a nice, beautiful, finished meal on a plate. And yes. And then of course when I went into marketing, I found out it wasn't quite so simple. I'm just curious in that more integr. perspective would you put that into the category of account-based marketing or account-based growth?
Or is there a particular model that you like as as an improvement on the old ways?
[00:09:03] Scott Barnett: Well, I mean, so the sort of lead, you know, converting down the funnel waterfall method is sort of the traditional model. And it works great in places like SaaS companies, which have a pretty small deal size and really high transaction volumes.
But it can fall flat. If you are in a company that's essentially hunting elephants, you know? Right. If you. Average deal size is 20 million. And you do, you know, 16 deals a year. You can't follow the traditional model. And that's when you start getting into the account-based growth strategies that I think are really starting to come online.
And you know, with some of the tools like demand-based and others like them companies are starting to tackle that. It's funny because account-based marketing is, is is a term you hear a lot about today, and I try to stay away from that because it drives people to think about that whole ABM thing as a marketing thing.
Right. Well, and. salespeople can just disengage once they hear that. But the fact is the model breaks down pretty quickly if sales isn't part of it. So a lot of companies are moving towards account-based growth, or they're calling it AB B X for that reason. They're moving away from ABM as a term.
Yeah.
[00:10:35] Roger Courville, CSP: Which at least in my humble opinion, begins with a mindset. Before it's a software or a process or something like that, right. To the point that you made a little earlier about sales. Great. Because probably plenty of folks here listening to this aren't necessarily working on 20 million deals, but we live in a world that has a degree of complexity now.
That is off the charts, right? So whether that's multiple channels by which you could possibly even get to know your target or targets, or that's dealing with the multiplicity of potential influencers inside of an organization, cuz they're all a whole lot more connected than they used to be. I went through a, I got some Siemens certification eons.
when I was a place where, and then the words of account-based marketing or account-based growth hadn't even been invented yet. , yeah. But the e, the deal was how do you deal with complexity, right? Because we used to think, oh, who's the decision maker? Do they have budget, authority, time? And some fairly simple kind of top level things.
And those are important, but what is the nature of the web of conversations going on within the target account is a problem for both marketing and. .
[00:11:49] Scott Barnett: Yeah, that's right. And the thing about looking at things from an account level is I think sales has always naturally been geared towards doing that.
They've always had a list of target accounts that they wanna win when they wanna win. They don't, they don't think about, you know, You know, Joe Gonzalez is the decision maker necessarily. They're thinking about the brand that's gonna bring 20, you know, you know, 20 million or whatever into their company that year.
The big, big deal. And so and they understand that they need to touch not just the person who signs the contract, but they need to touch all of the other folks that are in the deal. The influencers the ones who could be a blockers. They, they have to map. That entire process. And so, they, I think are naturally geared towards accounts.
I think marketing has struggled with this for , in some cases until the advent of some tools that have started to give us some real metrics around what is happening at the account level, , and so you look at, for example, a tool like demand-based. Tell you who's been on your website, it can tell you, based on these accounts what kinds of terms are they searching on?
It can tell you, it can provide you a platform in which you can try to increase awareness of your company across and your offerings across an entire account by doing things like display ads and LinkedIn. And It even has some really cool stuff that you can do where it can orchestrate or automate the movement of accounts as they move through your.
Buyer's journey, right? So somebody who's an account that's aware and then you start to see signs of engagement. Well, if that aga engagement's anonymous, you don't know who at that account, you might reach out to you. Some of the tools now make it easy to find those people to dig in and actually to the organizations and see who they are.
Look at who your standard buying center is and then start to make outreach to them in con in concert with sales. And so, these tools have forced marketing and sales to play nice and play in a new way and work together. And that's, I think, really what's driving this whole idea around, , this being a team sport.
[00:14:11] Roger Courville, CSP: Yeah. Well I remember when we implemented HubSpot some years ago. Of course, at the time I was an executive at 30 person company, so it was pretty easy to have those conversations. But to your point, let's talk about marketing for a second. You and marketing are now forced to actually get into the head of your sales team by virtue of some of these new tools that you have.
For instance, what do I want to do with somebody who, it's my website? Does it make a difference if that person hits my website today and then three months from now versus today and then two days later, right? And so now that kind of fuzzy logic of determining what constitutes interest and or how am I in marketing gonna help you and sales prioritize your time.
Is now in a way forced upon marketing, I should say. Because now you've gotta make marketing decisions that make you think like a salesperson. As in Yeah, do am I, is that person, is that behavior something that is indicative of why I would want to prioritize contacting that person versus somebody.
[00:15:24] Scott Barnett:
Yeah, no I mean, it's funny cuz you look at all the data that's now available and there's a lot of detective work that has to be done by both the marketing and the salesperson. So, for example let's say someone's on your website, they're not a customer today. And they're, sort of all over the place, end up on the jobs page and then come in.
And then spend a little bit of time on solutions and disappear, you know? Is that a co, is that a, an account that might be interested? Or is that just somebody who thinks that they wanna work for you? . Right. And you know, yes. Is all that solution stuff, , actually them getting ready to rec, regurgitate for a job owner.
You've gotta, you've gotta be able to suss that out and figure that out using the data. But it can get really sophisticated, you know, let's take a customer example where they have one product of yours and then they end up on the solution page and they're looking at. Another a, you know, a additional product that you could cross sell.
Well, I would say that is a huge opportunity that should be flagged with a red alert in, you know, with your salespeople. And that's what some of these systems allow marketing and sales to do now.
[00:16:38] Roger Courville, CSP: Yeah, I think there is this granularity of thinking about the customer journey or buying process.
The people understand instinctively, but even when they're trapped in kind of an old way of thinking, right? The term you used earlier, waterfall, right? Oh, here's the pipeline. Here's the funnel. Bam. Okay, now that's, it's a sale. And think about moving on to the next person. But every one of us has now been influenced by the fact that we open up our phone, we install an.
It's almost entirely a freemium model, and now they're doing behavioral analytics to figure out what part, what can I upsell you on? And they've created a science out of just the process of upselling, quote unquote after the sale.
[00:17:25] Scott Barnett: Yeah. Yeah. . So the whole model has changed because you're dead on, right?
Like we've made these, we've made these applications and these new models that help people move from freemium to paid to get a foot in the door product. And then next thing you know, you're being up sold something that's, , the real product that they have had in mind for you all along.
And there's all of this intelligence that's coming in from the world of things like e-commerce. And data analytics that look at like what might be the next best match kind of product for you. Yeah. And so yeah, it's, it's it's super interesting , like where things are going. And I think it's opening up a lot of things in people's minds at all levels of business.
[00:18:10] Roger Courville, CSP: Yeah. And to me, honestly, of course, it's obviously gonna depend on a on somebody's comp plan, but sales should be thinking about marketing in that. two, right? Yeah. I'll use another analogy, but for those of you who are here, , Scott and I know each other because he worked at you know, the go-to with the go-to folks eons ago, and we did, we, Hey, did really deep analytics and our old friend Kelly Eason right.
And then got into in-app analytics,., even when that was really super new and. The nature of what you can do inside of an app is just like now what you can do in all of this front end on your website kind of thing, with regard to understanding what people are using, what they want to use, and perhaps sussing out intent.
But let's get, let's take that complex selling scenario and all of this potentiality. , but use some of your words to say, okay, let's stay focused on the main thing. Some of your words that I loved was get to the damn demo. . Yes. Yeah. So we got all this stuff. You can read that article, but we really need to get the football down the field.
get to the damn demo. How do you get to the damn demo?
[00:19:36] Scott Barnett: I think that is the key is, , salespeople are always very attuned towards the process of advancing the football down the fields of moving stuff from , what's a potential to what's in my pipeline, to what's closed and getting in front of the decision maker and showing the product.
The thing that marketing people, I think sometimes struggle with is they, they don't spend their time in kind of like a show mentality. They talk about the benefits. They talk about, gosh, you know, this thing is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and they don't actually say, You prospect said You need to fix this problem.
Let me show you how this problem gets fixed. Which is what a salesperson does and a disciplined salesperson does, knowing that if they don't get to the point, they're gonna, they're gonna get tossed out of the office here or off the online meeting in a very short amount of time. So being really efficient with your use of time is something that a marketing person.
Spent some time in sales, we'll learn and, and I think it makes us better, honestly. I think it makes us more focused. Yeah,
[00:20:43] Roger Courville, CSP: I would agree. And , Peter Cohen's book great demo. One of the essential elements of that is demonstrate the most. Potent thing first. Right? This presumes that you understand the, what's keeping 'em up at night or that kind of thing.
But he's like, don't bury that three points into the demo and don't do a linear thing. Well, here's how you log in and Right. He's like, if you know, that's the most painful thing they have, whatever it is, show that first. Yeah. And then pick off the list of the priorities that you know, that they have.
And I always just thought that was,
[00:21:21] Scott Barnett: I always thought that was good. I think that's great advice. I mean, one of the things that I've worked on in the past are these video videos where you get a video introduction inside an email and you could actually, if you knew that someone's pain point you could include a short sort of, "Hey, I saw..."
or, "when we spoke you mentioned these specific pains points, but this is the one that really stood out for you and said was costing you all this money. Let me show you how that works," and then you can transition then into showing a screen share of your product in the platform.
And it's all within an email. Now suddenly your sales. Is turned into a marketing guy cuz he's doing video emails. Right?. And so the the technology really is starting to blur the worlds in a way that's very cool.
[00:22:11] Roger Courville, CSP: Which is a really potent to, I think those didn't exist in the years back when I was in that role.
But because those then have analytics that the salesperson sees, you begin to put. into the marketer's shoes by going, oh, how many opens did I get? How long should this video be ? Was it more useful to say this at the beginning or say this at the beginning? You know, those kinds of things I think is a pretty cool thing.
But talk about alignment. is there anything that we've missed with regard to talking about the secrets to driving better alignment between marketing and sales? .
[00:22:56] Scott Barnett: Yeah. I mean, I think what we gotta stay away from is this sort of finger pointing thing. I think, you know, what's, what becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy is, you know, you take a team and a team that's losing, , the team that's not hitting their goal or whatever often will turn to finger pointing instead of everyone accepting responsibility for what they could have done better and, how they could work together better to drive a drive a result that I think, will make them win. And so , alignment is really about a couple things. It's about, hey let's talk about where we have shared interest and shared goals. And let's not spend all of our time on metrics, for example. that marketing might care about, but that sales has no interest in, right?
Let's put the, but let's put the shared stuff on a shared dashboard and let's align around this. Let's talk about it. And so it means having the same metrics. It means getting together and talking. It means having alerts and talking about the breakdowns and being honest, but not in a finger pointing way more in a, let's improve the process way.
And I think. Those things. Plus coming up with plans, right? So if sales has a big number to make , they gotta back into how many calls they're gonna make and they gotta ba back into, how many accounts they need in their pipeline. They have to kind of step back from, this is what I need in sales, how do I get there?
And marketing needs to help them to achieve those goals and say, "okay, well of the ones you need to add to your pipeline, here's how many we think we can help you with. Here's how many we can add. And we'll take some goals too, and we'll have some skin in the game too." As soon as you both start working together, both functions, to achieve that ultimate goal of driving the revenue, I think that's where the real synergies start to happen. And in a small company, it's super obvious. In some cases, it's one guy doing the sales and the marketing, right? So you can't fight. But in larger companies, this can get tough and you gotta spend some time and get on the same page.
What do you think? ,
[00:24:59] Roger Courville, CSP: oh, wait a minute. Are you interviewing me ? Well, no, you said something that maybe I'll put an exclamation point behind because I think part of deciding what you own together, also necessarily includes what you don't own together. Yeah. Right. And this is gonna go back a whole lot of years and therefore kind of refer to the old model, but I think of a quantitative model that is kind of like an x y axis. Roger hold his arms up, like a graph, you know, in one.
The marketing's goals are at a 90 degree angle to the sales goal you already identified. Sales is all about maximizing your time, which means that if I can only make X calls today, I need to make those the best calls with regard to what is my, in a sense, average revenue per. . That means I might call one person 12 times over the next month and another person.
I'm not, I don't call at all in, at least in the old model, the, you know, we used to hear things like, well, you need to touch everybody six times or nine times before you get there, right? So marketing's thinking, well, wait a minute, we got this lead here. We spent 180 bucks to generate, and you never even called him.
And my thought was in sales was going well, no. I see the world differently and I think it's useful to think about not what, not only what you own together, but what you don't own together, meaning, okay. Marketing also then is responsible for how we nurture or warm these people that on one side or sales.
I think the same is true when it comes to like KPIs. It's easy I think to go, oh, here's the KPIs. You know, calls to demos, demos to proposals to whatever your KPIs are. But at some point, if you don't start optimizing the process, the only answer is more . You gotta make, you wanna make more sales, you gotta do more demos, you gotta do more demos.
You gotta make more phone calls. How am I gonna make more phone calls if nothing else has changed? Well, I'm gonna work 10 hours a day instead of nine hours a day. Right? At some point there is no more there to, to, in terms of how do we make our nut this quarter. And so I think at some point I have to know what I don't own. Along the way
[00:27:31] Scott Barnett: I love that point though because I mean, where you go with this is something that people who owned a business get because time becomes incredibly critical. And so you have to be able to optimize what you're doing. If your funnel converts at X percent and you have to keep feeding more and more in there, that means spending more money.
It means spending more time. It means a lot when what might work better is making minor tweaks to optimize key things in the funnel. So maybe what's happening is you have all these people who are showing up on your website, but your website's terrible or it doesn't have a good placement of the call to action buttons or whatever it is.
And testing over time, you would be able to get more of those people in and your visit to lead creation rate would double. Right. And there are some really great thought leaders out there in the area of conversion rate optimization. Talk to you about how to optimize that part of the funnel. Or maybe your problem is downstream and you're doing a ton of demos, but you're just not closing the business.
And so maybe it's, it's your conversion rates. There are the issue. And, you know, when I started out doing sales, I was doing things in a very sort of marketing esque where I was very soft, for example, in my clothes. I learned over time that if you listen to people who are experts in sales and how they structure conversations and the questions that they ask they drive more sales by asking better questions and structuring conversations to head a head in a certain direction.
And so, I was able to increase and essentially double the sales that I was doing just by adopting some basic changes. And what was funny was what got me to do a lot of that was driving around in a car with my mom , who is a sales professional who's got 40 plus years experience doing sales and having her say, "well, I noticed you might have asked for the close here, or you might have, you might have uncovered something here if you just asked this question."
And she kind of got me to look really carefully at structuring what I was doing. So it was less like a presentation and more like, a consultation where I ask them what they wanna solve and then we spend the time figuring out how to solve that versus me just walking in doing something vanilla for people.
That was, you heard it here first folks. Yeah. You heard
[00:29:59] Roger Courville, CSP: it. You heard it here. The Scott Barnett secret sauce. Take your mom on sales demos. I
[00:30:03] Scott Barnett: think. I think it would help some of us. It helped me .
[00:30:07] Roger Courville, CSP: Oh, that is awesome. But you know, here's three words that I used to use with my team. Optimization drives valuation.
Well, here's my bias. You know, I'm also pragmatic certified, and so this kind of is more from a product marketing, product management perspective. But if there is any credence to the concepts of pricing, packaging, positioning relative to total available market and that kind of thing. It is tweaks in portfolio, right?
The very relative options that you have. That is part of what influences how you get to market and penetrate a market. Meaning at some point, optimization isn't just, "how do I think about getting from, X number of demos generate X number of proposals. There's a bigger picture."
That is involved in how you optimize that kind of thing. Well,
[00:31:13] Scott Barnett: you're bringing a whole new discipline into the conversation now. You've suddenly thrown product in there, and now this is like a three-way thing, but I love that you did that.
[00:31:21] Roger Courville, CSP: I probably shouldn't do that.
[00:31:22] Scott Barnett: No, I love that because honestly, that's the next natural step is product needs to be part of all of this. It's not just marketing and sales that needs to drive revenue. It's product. I mean, how do you drive marketing and sales if your product becomes out of date or stale and is missing key things that the market wants?
You can throw all the money you want at the front end of it, but if you don't drive the improvements in the product, nothing is gonna change. And a lot of companies have seen that.
[00:31:52] Roger Courville, CSP: Yeah. Well, to be fair, probably someone listening to this is thinking in terms of sales or marketing leadership, and that may or may not include their ability to affect Pricing, packaging, positioning, product features and that kind of thing.
Though I will say this, one of the most powerful things you could do from the perspective of sales and marketing leadership, if product is a separate discipline, would be to help them prioritize their requirements management, right? Yeah. As in here's the new features we want to build. Here's are the bugs and fixes that we need to do, or the tweaks. And in any given period of time, I can only deliver on so many of those requirements.
one of my best friends was our product management leader. And you know, you literally end up with a database of a thousand or more, sometimes thousands of ideas.
And hey, in this release next week, we're only gonna get to 23 of them, which 23 are gonna be most effective with regard to making money. Sales and marketing can have a lot to do with helping them think through that. If you get.
[00:32:59] Scott Barnett: You're right. And this is a place a actually, where a marketing person who lacks sales skills is gonna suffer, right?
Cause they may have all the data, they may have talked to the customers, but they may not be able to sell their internal vision. To the product people and get it prioritized. And so maybe internal sales from a marketing person is actually, cuz we're all selling all the time, is actually a skill that's worth building because, and that's something that, that you could learn from a salesperson.
Yeah. Why? Listening to sales leaders?
[00:33:29] Roger Courville, CSP: Well, and the other way around too, right? I mean, if we're telling salespeople they need to get into the heads and hearts of their potential customer the same is true inside of the organization, right? Because what engineering doesn't want to hear is if we only had X we could close the deal and beat competitor y.
Right? They've heard they hear that all the time. Right? And their perspective instantly is. y. Yeah. But we've got a bunch of other competing priorities. Thanks for weighing in as Right.
[00:34:07] Scott Barnett: They have to get good at managing the backlog, but that sometimes means that you don't get the attention that you might otherwise need. And so be being able to persuade them is super key. And that internal sales process involves both having the data, which is more of a marketing discipline and then.
And knowing the market size and then having the skills to convince people, which is more of a sales discipline.
[00:34:27] Roger Courville, CSP: I remember the first time I got my lunch handed to me in this case by the owner of the company. He's like, I evaluate that request on two things. One, can I sell it to other people? Number one, because if not, that just means I'm a job shop software developer, and I'm not a job shop software developer.
I'm not developing a feature for one customer. I don't care what your deal is. Is this duplicatable and sellable to other people In our target? And the second thing was, will they pay for it? Yeah. Meaning will they pay for us to develop that for them? And that stuck with me a long time.
[00:35:04] Scott Barnett: That's a great, that's a great business model though cuz if you're in, if you are in consulting for example, your clients can pay you to develop software that you can then learn to sell to other people and essentially pay your product costs. And then you can turn around and market that if you can be disciplined about what you, what work you take on and not have, be so specialized that it only applies to one company in the world.
Love that.
Well, and assuming that we're talking here to somebody in. You know, in a mid or larger size company, it's probably who we reach with this particular set of conversations in a topic like this. Yeah. That might be something that sales and marketing could be thinking about and just getting inside of the shoes of what's going on elsewhere in your organization and say in terms of being able to position your request in a way that they will hear as opposed to not hear, because you know, they've heard it all.
So, Scott, let's. talk about ABX a little more. Is that Sure. Ha. Have we plumbed that from your perspective? , why do you think that's a good place to start when it comes to thinking about revenue generation as a team sport, whether it's somebody's formal methodology or book, or do you just have that as a kind of an ethos?
How, what's your. . I,
(SCOTT)
[00:36:18] Scott Barnett: I think the reason I want to emphasize this is because it's an area where some companies are struggling right now and they're seeing and some companies are seeing massive returns. And so, if you need to do more with less, if your budgets are flat in the economic environment, One of the ways to do that is to stand up a new demand model, like, you know, an account based growth strategy where you are targeting specific accounts jointly with sales and marketing and you are going after those in a structured way using things like automation to help direct accounts to different areas, right? And you can have different plays, for example, that which marketing is really good at.
Cause we've got marketing technology like Marketo or HubSpot that can run plays. And then you know, that and we can. , push the things that to sales, that sales needs and automate, help them automate some things. So, for example one of the companies that I've worked with is demand-based.
Demand-based has this whole orchestration module, which, you know, as things move through the buyer's journey and they start to look like they are pretty qualified you can put that in a sales cadence. In sales loft. Or outreach, which is a sales system, sales communica communication system. Integrations exist to push things into Marketo if it looks like it might need to be nurtured or if it's upstream of nurturing, we don't know who the contacts are and we need to, you know, drive awareness.
Advertising can be run to them. It can be. Really, really intelligent and in terms of helping you using data to, to drive the next action. You know, and I've talked to companies like Domo, Domo's doing some super cool stuff. I can't talk too much about it cuz under the cone of silence, but like, they're a database company that's using account-based growth strategies to do things like tell their sales reps.
Hey, this account is one that you should pay attention to, and here's a list of things that we recommend you talk about based on what they were up to. Mm-hmm. . They, they actually talk about account based growth as being one of the more important things in their marketing arsenal. And so if it's something you haven't really capitalized on yet, if it's something you haven't really set up yet, if you don't know who's on your site, you don't know what they're doing.
If you don't have that level of detail and depth in terms of target accounts, it's a good place to start playing together. Cause marketing and sales have to cooperate on that one. Figuring out who the target accounts are and rolling out the plays and and, and going after those accounts and trying to.
[00:39:06] Roger Courville, CSP: you just touched on a really powerful thing that I haven't thought about for a while because, and it's relevant to both sales and marketing, which is not just the who as in, here's the account, here are the key players, you know, and maybe what's the ac, their activity on our website, or that kind of thing.
But the kind of timing that happens. When you understand where they're at as a company. I mean, I remember an old tactic in sales, the Y u Y now email, right? Hey Scott, I'm reaching out to you because I saw that you just had a press release, and if you know this, I, you know, if this implies that you guys are X then you might be interested in, you know, Y why you, why now?
Yeah. Sometimes the timing of just good news, bad news or a product release or something means that there's a another dimension or dynamic to to when the time is right.
[00:40:07] Scott Barnett: Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that with the tools that we have now, like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can have kind of a unique view into and so, for example there are tools that look at the press releases. There are tools that look at organization changes. There are tools that look at things like promotions. Those are things that you can actually automate outreach based on. And there are companies that are doing that very successfully.
Interesting.
[00:40:33] Roger Courville, CSP: See, I didn't even. . I didn't know that. And that totally makes sense because hey you and I both know when there's a merger or a staffing change, somebody takes over the EMEA division. You know, there's in a sense some new brain is coming in, going, okay, there's gonna be new budgets, new head, new headcount, shifts in headcount, shifts in strategy.
What does that mean for you? And therefore how you should sell and market. But Scott, are there any questions that I should have asked you that I
[00:41:04] Scott Barnett: haven.
I can't think of anything. I think we've had a good conversation. I think that maybe just the, what's next question would be, You know, awesome.
In this area. Yes. Yeah. I mean, so I think that a lot of companies in the future are gonna be looking at how do they benefit from things like ai, right? And how do we scale? So if you've got one salesperson how do we scale that one salesperson so you, they can have an outsize impact.
And the only way to do that is, is using things like technology and better processes. Cuz you're right, if you've only got a certain number of hours and your budgets are flat and you can't add three more sales per salespeople, how are you gonna drive? More revenue, you're gonna have to focus on things that are higher profit.
You know, changing the product mix, perhaps the people are selling things that have a higher take rate. Partnerships. There are a bunch of things that you can do, but technology and better use of technology I think is gonna be like a key part of that. And so I'm excited to see sort of what comes next.
You know, Microsoft just inve invested in. Chat, G p T, which is that AI technology and no small amount. Yeah.
[00:42:18] Roger Courville, CSP: Right. What's that? And no small amount, right? I mean, 10 billion. That's putting a stake in the ground. .
[00:42:25] Scott Barnett: It is. And you know, it's funny because a lot of people are worried that AI could be abused by kids who'd wanna have AI write their term papers for them, right?
And it could be better term paper than the kid could write. Granted it probably would crib a bunch of sources that would be illegal. , there's someone you saw this last week,
[00:42:48] Roger Courville, CSP: you saw this. What's that? You saw just this last week. , Chad, G b t, or I mean, AI successfully passed the Wharton MBA entrance exam.
I mean, yeah. Crazy. No, you're right though. And some of this stuff is just gonna happen and we're just gonna kind of follow along. But I think if there is a way that someone can get ahead of this, which I think is to your point, keeping an eye out for where and how this might touch down for us as sales and marketing leaders could be huge.
right? Yeah. And I don't just mean, can you write, you know, kick out more social media posts? I mean, the ability to smartly evaluate accounts or other activities in a way that teaches you along the way instead of you having to teach the software everything that you want from it.
[00:43:40] Scott Barnett: Yeah, I think that's a super valid point.
I mean, and you know, we're getting a lot of benefits from AI and predictive modeling today. Salesforce has built Einstein into their you know, products so that it can. Bill do you a predictive lead scoring model to help sales prioritize its time on the stuff that's most likely to convert based on the data science.
Right? That's something that can be set up and run an autopilot in the background and come up with a model that's way more sophisticated than anything that marketing was able to put together 10 years ago by guessing at what the point value of a webinar attendance meant, you know? Right. .
[00:44:20] Roger Courville, CSP: Exactly
[00:44:22] Scott Barnett: But it, it's funny that, you know, we have all these tools, all this data, and yet you know, in some cases I, I still feel like we're just in the baby steps of some of this stuff and we're just starting to get, you know, learning how to make it work all together and bringing people into becoming digital natives that care about data and care about, you know, technology.
I think that's gonna be. A thing that's maybe challenging with sales and marketing people in some cases is we like our art or, you know, we like getting out there and pressing the flesh and closing and we believe that those are the ways to move things forward. And what we may find is that the technology can extend us and take us in new directions that we never thought of before.
So I'm real excited. I think the future of this stuff is to be written, but there are some interesting things sort of showing up right now in terms of you know, the direction.
[00:45:22] Roger Courville, CSP: Anything else besides AI to keep an eye
[00:45:25] Scott Barnett: on? I think AI combined with automation and analytics are gonna be sort of the triple threat. And I think the companies that can make good use of it are, are, are gonna have a competitive advantage over the ones that can't or don't. And so if, if, you know, as I'm looking at sort of the landscape of, you know, of the future, you know, as you know, as a software developer, you know, writing something once and then having it scale in infinitely, you know, you, you write a piece of software once and then you can sell an unlimited number of those that used to be the way of the future.
But what if using ai, you know, I'm able to write. , you know, almost an infinite number of variations with my software. That, you just taking standard coding, you know, that the AI sort of fills in. And then I can better tailor my stuff to the market in a way that my, my competitors couldn't do before.
The ones who are early adopters on this are gonna have a huge competitive advantage. And it's not just in marketing and sales, it's in product developments. It's everywhere, but it's gonna be around analytics, it's gonna be around automation, and it's gonna be around ai. I think that's, I think that's where things are gonna be headed and. for somebody who likes talking to people and enjoys, you know, making a sales call and making that sale and gets the thrill of it, you know, it's a little scary to think that, you know, at some point, you know, an AI may be able to, you know, take some calls off of my plate or some section of the funnel out of my hands because people can't distinguish it from me or it's better than me because the emails that are going out in my name were the emails that were.
The most successful from the 10% most successful salespeople in the company. Right? And they were the ones that, that were evaluated as being, you know, what should go out? Maybe I was in the bottom per, you know, 5% of my salespeople. Now, the stuff that was crafted by the top 10% starts going out in my name, and suddenly my numbers start to search.
Like, and that's what automation can do. It's, I think it's just a super interesting time right now, honestly. But also maybe a little scary cuz you wonder like, what's gonna happen with my job . And I think the key
[00:47:55] Roger Courville, CSP: Go ahead and in a way that's not new, right? I mean the, yeah, we could probably point to plenty of historical examples, but we'll save that for another time, another cup of coffee conversation.
Yeah. And Scott, I really appreciate you spending the, just a few moments to, to kind of share your insights. If someone here wants to connect with you, LinkedIn the best place. Is that the best place to connect or get in
[00:48:19] Scott Barnett: touch? Yeah, if you just go to linkedin.com/in/ Scott Barnett, I am the one. That's probably the best way to reach me.
[00:48:29] Roger Courville, CSP: Beautiful. Well, Scott, thank you for spending a little time and if you're still listening to this and I trust that you are, I really appreciate you spending a little time just having a cup of coffee and giving us an ear on V two s Thought Leader Conversation series. We will see you next time and.