Developing a Shared Vision for Your Sales and Marketing Team

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Link is in the show notes. What's up, Matt? What's up? First thing is, I forgot to cut off my Do Not Disturb, I need to do that now so I hear dingin'. I just got that.

Next thing is, how cool is it that, what was the name of our product? In Houston. How cool is it in Houston right now? We're going through a heat wave right now, we're already at 100 degrees, it's not even July yet. But I thought it was cool that Amateur heard you say that you didn't get a presenter,

they sent you one. Once again, thank you to those guys, you didn't have to do that. We appreciate that. Yes. Matt's going to use it and he's going to come back and give a review on that. And then we had another company send us a product to review, which we'll get to on next

episode because I haven't had a chance to even open mine yet. I just... You just opened it? I literally opened it. Yes. And it's actually pretty cool.

It's a rechargeable ring light, almost like a travel ring light. So they were listening when I said, think about sending us Gadgety stuff to review because this is definitely Gadgety. I can't wait to see if it actually works. I'm not real big on the gram, but you know what, it might be useful for my team's call when you're remote.

Well, I can tell you just like I probably sound a lot better, thank you Mark for this awesome mic here. I think when you do video, being well lit is super important. I can tell you when I have calls on the road, when I don't have my normal setup, sometimes the lighting's weird or whatever, or you have to do it on your phone. I've used these things not consistently in the past, but it always looks high quality

at better when you have that backlight. Yeah. So I'll let you know next episode. This episode, so Matt and I've talked over and over again about how we both believe that sales and marketing should be joined at the hip, but we actually haven't talked about how.

So I thought this episode we'd talk about developing, achieving a shared vision for both your sales and marketing team. A couple of reasons why I think this is important. Number one, focus. So you want both your sales and marketing team to be focused on the same results. Now what they do to get there will be different and what pieces of the puzzle they solve will

be different, but the end result, they need to share that, you have that shared focus. And then another thing is motivation. There is nothing more demoralizing as a salesperson than to have somebody from marketing come in and give you an all brand new playbook, all brand new material and you had no input on it and the customer had no input on it. And on the same side, I bet it pisses marketing people off when sales people take the work

that they did and then change it for their own use. And that would not happen if they just talk to each other. It wouldn't be a waste of time and a waste of creative resources and that leads into things like better decision making. If both the marketing and sales team talk to each other and have a shared vision, they're going to make better decisions on how to spend their limited resources, right?

And then that collaboration when they have that better decision making and that focus is going to lead to better results for both the marketing team and the sales team, which finally means it's going to drive more revenue for the company. So I see the why as making just like total sense. Now Matt, we got to talk about the how. Sales people and marketing people typically have different personality traits, right?

In my world, in my lifetime, sales people tend to be extroverts. They tend to be very resistant to pushback to the point of sometimes they're annoying. They tend to be solely focused on things like revenue or new logos. Marketing people need tend to be more introverted, more retrospective, much more creative. They're not resistant to pushback. In fact, you have to be careful, you don't push back on them too hard because you literally

hurt their feelings sometimes. And they're much bigger picture thinker. They're not focused on, you know, that commission check or that new logo. And so there's two different personalities. How do you bring those personalities together? Well, you know, I've been on both sides.

That's why I asked you to question you're the perfect person. And I can tell you, so I've always wanted to be a marketing person. I love marketing. I love data. I love analytics. I would say I'm more of an introvert.

When I said what I wanted to do, my mom was like one of the first employees of Microsoft. She said, you have to do sales first. She said, if you're going to do marketing, you need to understand what it is to sell and how to sell. And you need to be good at sales because actually what marketing is, is sales online or sales when you're not in the room, right?

Or it's the leave behinds or it's the conferences. Like if you don't understand that process and how it works, then you're not going to be good at it. And there are a lot of people that come up in marketing that came up as a graphic designer or a web designer. So they don't understand business.

They don't understand sales. And so they're having to learn something through theory, right? And not application and then apply that with salespeople. So if you ask me how to connect the two is you almost need sales liaisons or embeds on the marketing team to help guide that. You shouldn't let them go into a dark room or not a dark room, but like go into a room

and like talk about it and take the data and figure out whatever they think and then come out and present it to you. It's too siloed. That's what we've been talking about on this call. There needs to be gates. There needs to be check-ins across the way or there needs to be somebody in bed or even

somebody that's running the marketing department needs to have come from sales. I think that that's why I've had so much success in marketing is I understand what the goals are, right? It's not like, oh, we got to look at the data to get someone to buy this like thing and we can make decisions based on data or this looks nice or whatever. But it's being driven by the sales knowledge, right?

And so I do see a lot of organizations that are structured in a way where dare I say marketing is marginalized by sales, right? Like sales is like the driver and if you looked at a org chart, okay, you got, we talked to a CRO, right? We got sales and then we got marketing, but it's probably more like CRO sales, like marketing. If you're seeing what I'm drawing here is it's not an equal head-to-head.

It's kind of like, hey, if we need to do a, we need some graphic design or some sales pieces or we're going to go to a conference like talk to marketing about that, they'll give you the support you need. It's really what I'm hoping to accomplish with this podcast is digital strategy or even marketing strategy, driving a lot of then the boots on the ground with sales, right? Like there's an opportunity to guide that.

And I think that the CRO position is perfect because they can now balance them equally and guide the organizations forward because there's sales enablement, like that's not something that gets talked about a lot. There's all kinds of ways that marketing can help B2B salespeople sell better and also warm up leads, build that brand equity, drive those things and then also follow up and help close leads.

Like there's so much, I think that is being underutilized with marketing and I think a lot of it goes back to they don't have the sales knowledge on how to integrate this stuff properly. So when they speak in a meeting or whatever, their input doesn't hit right. Does that make sense? Not always, not all people, but I think that may be what's going on.

So let me back you up because you got way so far ahead of me. I want to focus just a little bit on literally the tactical parts of how you bring a sales team and marketing together. A couple of things I've seen that worked really well. Number one, put them in the same floor. Literally put them in the same cue spaces with each other.

Don't have them in separate parts of the building. That will naturally, organically cause them to talk to each other, get to know each other, right? Make work friends. What's funny right now, salespeople, your number two work friend besides your sales manager should be your marketing peer.

Y'all should be best buds, right? So put them in the room together. That's something that simple. Then look at the way your compensation's structured and have a shared bonus for when sales and marketing complete something together. So salespeople are used to getting commission checks.

Marketing people aren't. Let me tell you, marketing people, when you play a role in a sale, I think you should get a piece of that, just like the sales guy. Not as much because the sales person is doing the majority of the sales work, but I think if you bonus your marketing people when sales is successful, it's going to once again drive them to have common goals and everybody appreciates an extra dollar in their pocket if they do

a good job. So I think just those two things, and I've seen this work, I've seen this in big companies, putting the sales marketing people together physically and then giving them a common financial reward for when they close deals does a lot to bring sales and marketing together. I can't agree with more with both of those suggestions. I think with mainly creative people, they do not understand the concept of like performance

base pay, but if you dangle some bonus out there in front of them, that if this does well, everybody can get behind that, right? They can get behind company goals, they can get behind department goals, they can get behind knocking out these KPIs and really the more you tie them in and I'm a big, I'm a big advocate for taking whatever the deal looks like or however the comp structure is and you know, it could be like a tip pool almost, right?

It could be like out of all the deals that close out of this, like whatever percent goes to shared amongst the team based upon their pay spread, like there's ways to do it where they're incentivized by success because if you're just paying somebody to get a paycheck, especially in this remote world, I just got off the phone with the client, they're not going back to the office either, okay? And so you've got people at home collecting a paycheck, not connected in with the culture,

they're actually salespeople. I said, hey, this is actually a concern because you know, the bullpen is really important to learn and hear what other people are doing and if you talk about customer service people and they're just answering the phone, but there's no incentive based pay to what they're doing, they're going to clock and clock out, they've lost connection to the culture. I think it's going to be coming like an epidemic type issue with people working from home.

If there's no incentive and that opens up a whole new kind of. Let's table that because that's a great subject for another podcast episode is if you're sales and marketing, you're working from home, that fact that we really should, in fact, we will, that is a great topic. So let's keep moving forward about how you're bringing these two separate groups together. We talked about common financial reward, physically putting them together.

The other thing is the team, when I say team, I'm now talking about the combined sales and marketing. The team needs to set a vision. Listen to me, folks. I'm not saying management needs to set the vision. The team does.

You need to get this combined team together and have them create the vision for the combined team. It's some work. It's going to be a couple of hours in a meeting room together. It could take a facilitator, right? And the reason I say it's so important that the team does it is so if they build this

vision, then they have accountability, they have ownership of it, and it makes it easier for them to really believe in their hearts and to execute on it as opposed to management coming in and saying, okay, your vision as a team is to increase revenue 20%. Honestly, that may be part of what this team comes up with, but the teams also go want things like, hey, if we do really well, can we have an extra day off in the week, right? The team itself is going to have different things that are important to them than management

will. It's important. This vision is created by the team. Now, it has to be approved by management. I'm not throwing management off the door, but the vision itself needs to be put together by this team.

And then once you have that vision, Matt, then it's like goal 101, right? You start setting goals and strategies, but I think the team should do that, not management. Well, if they don't have buy-in, like, and if you're looking at even productivity, right, you got to get that buy-in, that that's a reasonable sales goal. I can tell you, as a salesperson, I hated it, and I'm sure a lot of people still operate under this.

And I don't know all the reasons why, but I can tell you, I would crush a sales goal, and then they would go, well, next quarter, you got to do even better, right? And oh, we're going to restructure the comp plan. So even if you do way better and it's much harder to grow this territory, you're still going to make the same amount, right? And I always felt like I was like running on a treadmill on a certain thing because they

wanted to cap the performance. I don't know. I can tell you when I went to a straight commission, so I worked seven and a half years all commission and then did my own thing, man, I loved it, right? Like sink or swim, but man, if you could swim, the faster you swim, the more money you made. But that ownership is to get those people and to get the team to do it and say that

this is a reality. And a lot of times what I've found, Mark, when I've done that with my own team, is they set goals higher than what I thought that I was going to set, right? Are they set goals that you didn't even think of that in retrospect were better goals than what you were thinking of? That's always group think.

Group think is always better than solo think, right? So you want this new team to actually set the vision for themselves. Management needs to approve it. So it fits into the overall business strategy of the company. Then you need to start developing strategies and tactics. And let me kind of talk you through that.

I'm sure everybody knows how to do this, but basically you want to identify certain points, certain benchmarks or milestones, certain things you want to achieve. Once you identify those, that could be something like this quarter, we want to increase revenue by 20%, or we want to add three brand new logos to our list of customers, or we want to increase profitability. Whatever your business needs, whatever makes sense, those are your goals or your benchmarks.

And then you just work that backwards. So as a team, if I want to add three new logos to our company's list of clients, me and my marketing companion get together and say, what do we need to do to add those three new logos? And your marketing person will have some fantastic ideas about how to reach out using marketing to companies you're not doing business with, right?

And then the sales person's job is to help execute on that with the help of marketing. And so you just, you work those things backwards, you end up with a list of tactical things you actually can do, then you just set dates and time frames around those tactical things. So if you're going after the three new logos and your marketing peer is going to help you by gathering market intelligence and doing some targeted, say, pay per click ads to these companies, what date will that be done by?

So the sales person knows what date to start reaching out and starting to have conversations with these new companies. And then it's just a plan. It's a very simple, and people, you don't need to make this a 30 page PowerPoint deck. This could easily be a one page, eight bullet point thing, but it has to align with the vision that the team put together.

And you got to break that vision down to activities based on goals. And then you need to allow, need to attach time frames to that. And it just happens. The other thing is, especially if you've never done this before, is you're going to make mistakes. So be okay with it.

Roll with the punches, right? If you think it should have went right and it went left, don't beat yourself up. Just roll with the punches and understand you just got to keep moving forward. I mean, Mark, I don't know what else to say. I agree with everything you're saying. I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Mark is 60 minutes and 58 seconds. The first time since I've known Matt, he was speechless. I've never known Matt to be speechless about anything. So Matt, here's another thing, and you kind of brought this up earlier, but, you know, in the beginning, I talked about the difference in personalities and please no hate mail. I know some salespeople that are very introverted.

I know some marketing people very extroverted. So I wasn't making a generalization for everybody, just what I've noticed. But accountability. So in the sales world, your pay is your accountability. And just like athletes, salespeople in a company are usually ranked. You have your top salespeople, which you're in a great place.

You have most of your salespeople in the middle, which you're in a good place. And unfortunately, if you're a salesperson in the bottom, your days are numbered, right? And so just like an athlete, you're ranked and the best players get the best rewards and the worst players get let go. Marketing isn't done that way. So how, Matt, because you run a whole marketing organization, how do you help achieve accountability

with your marketing team? So a couple of years ago, we implemented something called EOS. I don't know if people know what that is, entrepreneurial operating system. It's a way to look at a business to make sure it's healthy and six different components. We modified it, right, for our needs, but it was a good methodology. Really, marketing people don't understand sales compensation and like how do you force

rank graphic designers, right? How do you force rank web developers? But well, I'm not saying that we want to rank them because it doesn't fit their job. No, no, no, no, let me, let me, let me, like, let me finish the thought. So essentially, like how we hold them accountable is one, we give them one to three KPIs, right? Here's one, the three KPIs to let you know if you're doing a good job or not, right?

We also have estimates on time of how long stuff should take and we track their time and see how close do they get to hitting the mark. We do quarterly reviews with each of them to understand how they're doing, letting them share, having an open door policy. Certainly if there's issues there, but we're really using like a data dashboard to understand what their workload is, how fast they're completing stuff.

We're using checklists, we're spot checking stuff. If there's any kind of escalation on clients during the delivery process, that's something that we're looking at, and if someone's not meeting the mark, and we actually evaluate them based on like a culture fit, like have they hit that? And there's actually EOS has three different components of like if they get no on any of these, like they're not a fit, but we really will coach up or coach out, right?

So here's the standard, here's the expectation or quote, here's what we're doing. Here's how you're doing on your projects. Here's what you're capable of doing. We try to match it up as best we can. And then, hey, if you're not doing a good job, we'll give you a verbal warning, we'll give you then a written, well, the verbal warning we actually write down, but it's not to them

anything written, then we give them written down, hey, we need you to be here. Again, this is happening in the quarterly reviews. And if it's to the point where it really needs a lot of coaching, and I want to get your opinion on this, Mark, like we put people on a performance improvement plan, and everybody thinks and immediately when you go on a pip, you're going to get like, let go, right? And I really don't view it that way.

I really view it like you're not operating at the level I think you could. But I'm putting you on a pip because I've seen the best self in you and I want you to step up and I want to give you the chance to do that. It's not that you're gone. Like if you just want to be gone, at least in Texas, right? To work state, I just say, you're gone.

We're going in another direction. Right. If there's no hope, I don't need to put someone on a pip. Like I put them on a pip to give them a chance. I've seen mixed feedback on that. And certainly when people get those negative reviews, they can't respond to criticism well.

And if their pay is not driving their performance, you've got to put something in place to hold that accountability. That's what we do. I'm curious what your thoughts on that. Yeah. So before I get to the pips, I do have some good thoughts.

You know, when I talk about accountability, people tend to think about it as making sure people are doing what they're doing. But when I talk about accountability, there's the opposite of that, which is making sure you recognize your contributions. So if you're an introvert and you're a phenomenal graphic artist and you get stuff done three times faster than everybody else does, you should be recognized and be

accountable for that and be rewarded for it. So accountability is not just making sure you're doing your job. It's also making sure you recognize the folks that go above and beyond. That though, Mark, is how we would rate like a junior, like a line person, a senior person. And that would translate into potential bill rates, but also usually those people, if you're doing it right, are getting paid more, right?

If you're faster and you do something more, you're working on better projects and you're getting paid more. So really, it's kind of like you've got to match it up with how fast they're producing because that's the hard thing. Well, what's, you know, if you're using an agency, what's this rate versus that rate, right?

Like, well, you know, there's different rates and different expectations for different people at different tiers. And if it's a blended rate, like, you know, you might need a little bit more visibility, but essentially we pay people based on here's what someone should do. And they might have different criteria of completing something on time or doing something like certainly we take our award-winning graphic designers.

We won AMA award-winning graphic designers every year. We take them to the event. We connect them with the client. Like, I think that there's like perks and spiffs and stuff that we throw in there. But it usually actually ties to pays based on tiers, based on expectation. Yeah.

And I love where you brought that, that you actually bring them to see clients. That's another way to bring every sales person that's listening to this right now, grab your marketing buddy, right? And bring them client meetings, right? And if their marketing manager has an issue with them being away from the desk, go shut the door at the marketing manager and go and look, I'm going to help make your marketing

person a better marketing person. Let them leave the office, let them come to me with their client lunch, let them learn. You know, if that marketing manager doesn't see the value in that, let me know, because that is so valuable for marketing people to be included in sales conversations. The one thing I absolutely have to add there, and this is something that I did have to learn the hard way, okay, is the marketing team, right, is collecting a paycheck and

is so far removed sometimes from what's going on with the business and what's going on with the client. I had marketing people that have been working on accounts for six or seven years, never talked to the client. We had testimonials on our site from the client. They had never watched the testimonials.

So they're chugging away at the work for the client, and it's not this real person, the care of like delivering for the client, like there needs to be that human connection. People do business with people. And if you're marketing people are so far removed from what's happening with the business and so far removed from the clients, they're going to have a, not the level of care, right? That account manager has, or a salesperson have.

And as soon as I started making that connection that these are real people, these are real businesses, this is really affecting the health of the company on your quality of work and that your care in the work, it transformed our business. That's something I'll never go away from. Yeah. And so audiences, if you can't follow Matt and I's ADD discussion, sorry, but now we're

going to jump to pips, right back to pips. So I was placed on a performance employment plan when I was at Bell 30 years ago. I was a junior salesperson. Probably the best thing ever happened to me, right? I realized that I was not doing the tactical work that my management used to measure the salespeople.

So even though I was doing the work in my head of bringing in new revenue of farm and customer relationships, I got in trouble for not putting everything in our CRM, right? And I got placed on a pip. And that's when I realized it's like, it doesn't matter what I think I'm doing. It's what other people see that manage me, right? And so Matt, it was the best thing I ever did.

So I went from being placed on a pip and the next step on a pip at that time, if you didn't achieve the goals that you both agreed to the pip is that you were terminated, right? So I was this close to being terminated. I went from being on a pip to the next year. I was the highest grossest salesperson in the company. And Matt, I learned how to sandbag deals in the CRM.

Now, of course, that was not the goal of my company to put me on a pip. But once I understood internally how things are tracked and worked, I always had a dealer to that I would intentionally undervalue in the CRM. And I would also push the timeframe three months out from when I knew it was closed. So I could always bring it in early. So I learned how to work our internal systems.

Once again, it is not the reason my company put me on a pip. But look at what I learned. I went from almost being terminated to learning how to use the system for my own advantage to being one of the, you know, for that year, one of the highest gross and salespeople in the company, just because I learned how to work the system. So I think performance employment plans are great.

If you put on one, if you're a salesperson, look at it as an opportunity because literally somebody has spelled out what you need to do to make them happy. And that's not often that you get that in real life. Well, again, I think the performance based pay for marketing people, certainly if anybody is doing that successfully, please reach out to us. I would love to talk to you more about that because, man, I can tell you that

when I was a salesperson, OK, and again, salespeople think different than marketing people and I work with a lot of creatives and it's different. But man, when I was a salesperson, the pay drove my actions. Right? And I, you know what I mean? And like, if there was like loopholes to like go this way, I can tell you one of the companies I was at, what I was selling like that they wanted me to sell

was paying a 4% spread on the margin. OK. And then there was this other type of deal that they didn't do a lot of that they were paying out 20%. But then if you did both sides of the deal, you'd get 40% of the deal. So of course, that's what you went after. So I went this direction and they're like, what are you doing?

I started making all this money and they're like, because and I wouldn't change. They ended up actually offering me my own company at that point and broke that off and grew that and sold it. But essentially, I was like, this number right here makes way more sense. And this is about the same amount of work. So I'm just going to do that because that's what the comp plans telling me

that it wants me to do is to close these perm deals, right? Like I was a headhunter. And so I was working at this $40 million contract company and I was the only one just popping these perm deals like crushing it. So sales management, if you listen to what Matt said, I'm telling you right now, always your compensation plan drives the behavior of your salespeople.

I've seen this over the years. I've seen companies think it's more valuable to have longer term contracts with their clients, right? And so they incentivize their salespeople to have longer term clients. So what do the salespeople do? Reduce the margin on the deal so they can close a longer term deal.

So they put more money in their pocket, which actually hurt the company, right? Now the company's locked up in lower margin deals for a longer period of time because somebody didn't think through the comp plan. That's going to be another episode we're going to have to do, Matt, is how do you put together comp plans for both sales and marketing? That should actually be a good episode.

It'd be a good educational episode. I would love if we could interview somebody, Mark, that has implemented that on the marketing side and talk through it because I have some ideas. I'm in the process of opening a lot of that on my own. I'm reading stuff about it, but I don't have operational experience doing that. So if somebody out there is doing that and it's been successful, I think that

that would be a fascinating episode to interview like a marketing director or something. Yeah. So audience, if your marketing department is being paid for performance in some fashion, reach out to you. We'd love to have your show as a guest, give you some free exposure and help

educate your peers, right? The idea is solid. It just wants to get tactically, how do you do it? We'd love to have your input. Well, Matt, we managed to run all of our time, start off, talk about how do you tactically put sales and marketing teams together with a shared vision and up with

the PIP, which is not a bad place to end up. And we skipped over a couple of things that are going to be future episodes. I like the coaching idea, right? How great would it be if you coach sales and marketing people, if the same coach coach sales and marketing people, right? And then we talked about the compensation idea.

So we got some ideas for future episodes. Unfortunately, we're over time. We got to get out of here. This is where we do our product review, which we don't have. Actually, that's not true. We have the product.

We haven't opened it yet. So next show will review the product. All of our links for all of our Matt and I social channels are in the show notes. So just click, you know, go scroll left or right. If you're on iOS or Android, we're still working on our insider's group.

It's going to happen this fall. And it's time for the LinkedIn tipper fail of the week. And Matt, you can't see this because I just put it in my show notes, but I'm going to do a fail. So I got a note on LinkedIn connection request was actually very well written. It's actually a marketing director at a company call.

I'm going to call them out called BK a content and Matt, the opening line is. Hey, parentheses, first name, closed parentheses. Now, every marketing department out there just realized what this company did. They had a template, a boiler template that they copied and pasted. There's nothing wrong with that. I do that all the time.

But in that template was a place to put my first name and the person that sent me this by mistake, I'm sure didn't see parentheses, first open parentheses, first name, closed parentheses. So soon as I see this, I know it's boilerplate, right? That's not personalized. And so I didn't read any further than that.

So if you're going to use boiler on LinkedIn, make sure the fields that you're supposed to customize that you actually customize them. This is a really bad fail. So, well, I mean, it could have been automation, right? And they didn't have your name or if you're cutting and pasting like that, like you've got to check that.

But if you're doing automation, test it. Yes, test it first. Like, if you're going to send out an email to like thousands of people, you might want to like send it to a few people to see what it's going to look like to make sure that something's not wrong before you mass whatever you're doing. And remember, Matt, this was a company trying to get me to use their marketing

services. They showed me they don't have any eye for detail in their very first outreach. So my opinion of them as being a good marketing company is zero. And I'm sorry. So that's the LinkedIn fail of the week. It is funny.

And I'm not going to lie. I've done this before too. I've taken boiler and I missed something and I've sent it to somebody. But to Matt's point, you need to test, especially if you automate. Just it takes an extra five minutes. Don't do stuff like this.

Don't be a BK eight content marketing. Oh, I know those guys. Do you really know them? You know, do you know them? One of their old marketing guys started a app, a sports app. I went to school.

What a small world. If the wealthy listen to the podcast, reach out to us. And if you want to tell us why this mistake happened, we'd be happy to share the details, maybe even our audience would learn something. All right, ready to get out of here, Matt? Yeah, let's get it.

Remember, make a difference, not a sale. Check us out next week for another enriching and cheeky episode of Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing Podcast, a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network. Learn more at oggn.com.