Episode 27: How to Align Your Sales and Marketing Efforts | With Greg Gifford

Full transcript:

Greg Gifford  00:00

Marketing is supporting sales and sales also supports marketing. Unfortunately, in a lot of places, like I said, it's kind of like shouting into that echo chamber and nobody's answering.

The sales team is saying, “Hey, where are the leads?”, “Hey, we need help”, “Hey, we've got this” and marketing is just like, “Oh, we did a campaign and we put out some social ads. Cool, we're done.” – and there's no real cohesion. There's no overall marketing strategy. There's no cohesion in messaging.

Marketing, a lot of times isn't even segmenting their lists, and so they're marketing to people that are already customers. It's a really mixed bag of results because neither side is really working well together, and sometimes there’s a little hostility there.

David Bain  00:48

The Strategic Marketing Show is brought to you by Insights For Professionals: providing access to the latest industry insights from trusted brands, all on a customized, tailored experience. Find out more over at InsightsForProfessionals.com.

Hey, it’s David. How closely do you work with your sales departments? And how can marketing and sales do a better job of supporting each other's objectives?

That's what we're discussing today with a man who has a BA in Cinema and Communications, and an obscure movie quote for just about any situation.

He is one of the most in-demand speakers at digital marketing and automotive conferences all over the world, and is Chief Operating Officer at SearchLab, a boutique marketing agency, specializing in local SEO and PPC.

A warm welcome to the Strategic Marketing Show, Greg Gifford.

Greg Gifford  01:39

Hey, how are you, my friend?

David Bain  01:41

I'm very good, thank you, Greg. Well, you can find Greg over at SearchLabDigital.com.

So Greg, what is an obscure movie quote that alludes to how effectively sales and marketing teams tend to work together?

Greg Gifford  01:54

So it's not super obscure (at least in the US it's not) but I would go with the quote from the beginning of Ferris Bueller's Day Off – where Ben Stein, in his awesome Ben Stein style, is calling roll at the beginning of the movie, and Ferris is not in class. And he just continues to say, “Bueller. Bueller. Bueller.”, and he's just shouting into the echo chamber, and nobody's answering. Because I think that's typically how things work between sales and marketing in most organizations, unfortunately.

David Bain  02:37

I was just wondering what the thread there was, but I completely get it there. It has been a while since I've seen that movie. Is that the late 80s, I'm thinking?

Greg Gifford  02:46

Yep, yep. Late 80s – ‘86 if I'm remembering correctly – but yeah, super, super classic, awesome movie. Lots of fun ones in that one. Great quotes.

David Bain  02:57

So what are sales marketing doing well, in terms of working together? And what do they need to do a little bit better?

Greg Gifford  03:04

Well, at organizations where they do work well together, it's kind of a cohesive process. It's the same thing; it's just different sides of that same coin. And everyone's working together to row the boat in the same direction, marketing is supporting sales and sales also supports marketing. Unfortunately, in a lot of places, like I said, it's kind of like shouting into that echo chamber and nobody's answering.

The sales team is saying, “Hey, where are the leads?”, “Hey, we need help”, “Hey, we've got this” and marketing is just like, “Oh, we did a campaign and we put out some social ads. Cool, we're done.” – and there's no real cohesion. There's no overall marketing strategy. There's no cohesion in messaging.

Marketing, a lot of times isn't even segmenting their lists, and so they're marketing to people that are already customers. It's a really mixed bag of results because neither side is really working well together, and sometimes there’s a little hostility there.

David Bain  04:05

Okay, it sounds like there's a lot that can be improved on, there. Is there nothing at all that they're doing well, in terms of working together at the moment?

Greg Gifford  04:12

I mean, at certain places – for us, it's a really big goal to have one cohesive strategy, and marketing and sales are the same team. It's not a walled garden, where they're separate, it just doesn't make sense.

For us, particularly, we do a lot of event-based marketing, so we're out at conferences with either just speakers, or speakers and booths, or just with a booth. With as many events as we have going on, it's incredibly important that marketing and sales are aligned, because you're going to have the sales team at the event and the marketing team needs to have the right kind of collateral and the right kind of swag. They need to let them know where the booth is and what's going on. The sales team needs to know what's going on.

Then you've got the “not event-based” marketing, whether it's email campaigns, SEO, PPC, social ads, and all of those different things going on, but they need to have a direction. You can't just be saying, “Hey, we're putting ads out”, “Hey, we're putting social posts out”, or “Hey, we're doing an email campaign”, without a direction or a theme, without input from the sales team, and without knowing what the sales team is trying to do. Because most places have more than a single product or service, so which ones are you going after?

You can't just throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and mention everything that you do and hope that the one thing that somebody needs is gonna resonate. You have to segment that and do it the right way. A lot of teams that do it right, do think about those things. The sales team is helping the marketing team inform the direction and the marketing team is helping the sales team qualify the right kinds of people to go after.

David Bain  05:51

So, let's dive into the specific event-based marketing, sales marketing, opportunity that you highlighted there that you're currently doing with SearchLab.

Now, what do sales and marketing teams need to do beforehand, in terms of communication, to plan to take best advantage of that type of opportunity to work most effectively together?

Greg Gifford  06:14

That's a really great question. One of the things that we do, in particular, is we have a lot of pre-event and post-event marketing that goes out. Because, if you're going to invest in sending people to an event – whether you're just sending a speaker, maybe you don't even have a presence other than having a speaker there, or maybe you only have a booth in the expo area, and you don't have a speaker. That's two totally different ways that you need to market your presence at that event. Then, if you have a speaker and you have a booth, again – completely different situation there.

You need to let people know beforehand that you're going to be at the event and in what capacity. And then, afterward, you need to market that you were at the event to the people that were there and maybe didn't make it by to see you, or maybe the people that had a brief conversation. Or, if you're lucky enough to be at an event that has badge scanners, okay, you scanned all the badges of the people that were there having conversations, that's a different marketing strategy, with different things you need to do.

Then you’ve got people that maybe actually did a demo at your booth or at your area, and that needs different follow-up. Then, maybe at some events, if you're getting a booth at certain levels, you'll get an attendee list of everyone that was at the event, and you need to market to that. And you need to coordinate, between sales and marketing, what those things are that are going on – so that sales knows what to say when they're talking to these people.

Because if marketing does outreach before the event, and somebody reaches back out and is interested in talking, the sales team needs to know, “Hey, this came from a thing saying, ‘Hey, come see us at the booth!’” Now you're going to talk to this person differently, because you know they're going to be at the event and it's not just some random inbound lead. If it's after the event, you need to know what marketing was saying, so that if someone does reengage the sales team knows how to approach it the right way.

The sales team also needs to communicate with marketing to say, “Alright, for this kind of event, we did this event last year, here's what worked really well. Here's the messaging that really resonated, let's focus our marketing efforts around that.” Because if marketing is just doing everything in a vacuum, they don't have that input from sales to say, “Hey, look. We had three pieces of print collateral at the booth, and two of them we ran out of, and one of them – we hardly gave any out. Let's figure out what worked or didn't work there.” And you have this constant reiterative process of doing everything you can to have both sides working together to make the next event even more successful.

David Bain  08:43

I love the fact that you mentioned, actually: market the fact that you were at the event. I think many brands are perhaps guilty of attending an event, or even speaking at an event or exhibiting an event, and then it's over. As soon as the event is over, then the opportunity to market is perhaps over – but that's not necessarily the case.

In the past, I've gone to events – either spoken at events, attended an event, exhibited, etc. -had a list of attendees, and then actually created a piece of content as a result of being at the event. Maybe interviewed people or maybe just created a blog post about the event, and then used the opportunity to tell the attendees about the event, about the summary of the event, and then had the opportunity to build sales as a result of doing that.

Is that something like what you're thinking of there? Or are you thinking of something else?

Greg Gifford  09:32

Yeah, for sure. We do a lot of video content and, actually, (you know this, the people listening probably don't) I have a weekly video series that I've been doing for years and it's certain events, not every single one, but certain big ones like brightonSEO. I come over a couple of times a year to the UK, and I always do it there – we just had a really big automotive conference in the US a couple of weeks ago. I will always do some sort of video content around that event and then, a couple of weeks after the event, boom. We release that video content.

That way, it's something exciting that, at the event, you can kind of pump it up and people see you recording the content, and they'll want to watch it later. It's, a lot of times, interviews with different experts there, so those people will want to see what they said, and the final product. And it gives you a chance to do more marketing around that event, after the event – and it shows people that you were there and that you were active. It gets people re-engaged, because it's not just a dumb marketing piece, saying “Hey, come buy my stuff” again, because people get inundated with that all the time. You have to have a different approach.

For us, on both the sales and the marketing side, we like the softer touch – where it's things to get you interested. And then, “Oh, hey, by the way, if you're interested in talking to us, we'll also talk to you about this product or service”, not just, “Hey, we sell this”, “Hey, we sell this”, “Hey, we sell this” – because people get blind to that and deaf to that pretty quickly, and they're not going to pay attention.

David Bain  10:57

And especially with longer sales cycles, as well. Many marketers listening to this are from big enterprise brands, B2B brands, and have longer sales cycles, and you have to have some type of content to continue to build your authority without overtly selling what you do.

Greg Gifford  11:11

Yeah, exactly. That's where a lot of people that – I speak all over the world at a tonne of conferences. I spoke at 32 conferences last year in person. I run into a lot of people that say, “Well, you speak at all these events. How do you do that? You're not back at the office doing work?” Well, yeah. I do work on the road. A lot of times I'm flying in and flying back out in less than 24 hours.

A lot of businesses don't see the advantage to that, because they think you're just gone from the office – because they're not doing the marketing around it. You don't have to have a booth presence in the expo area to have marketing value of being at an event. There are a lot of events that I go to speak at where we don't have a booth, but it doesn't mean we're not doing marketing around making sure that butts are in seats for my talk. We want to let people know, “Hey, this is what time Greg is talking.”

We've got two other really phenomenal speakers. Mark Irvine is a world-renowned PPC expert and our Director of the SEO department, Dane Saville, is an amazing speaker, and the guy actually does wrestling in real life, so he's really dynamic on stage. Whenever we have any of the three of us out speaking at an event, we're going to do pre-show marketing to let people know, “Hey, Mark or Greg or Dane is speaking at this time in this room. Make sure you're there. It's gonna be awesome, you don't want to miss it.”

Then, after the event, a lot of times, we'll do a recording of that presentation, throw it up on our site, and then we can send it out and say, “Hey, if you were at the event and you missed it…”, or “Hey, maybe you didn't make it to the event. Here's a copy of the presentation so that you don't miss out on the awesome info that we shared.” That way, you're able to do some marketing around these speaker-only events and still get a lot of value out of them.

David Bain  12:56

And what about marketing and sales creating an overarching strategy for the coming year? Is that something where they both need to be in the same room together, hashing it out together?

Is it sufficient, for example, just to sit together maybe for half an hour, and then go into their separate identities to formalize exactly what they're going to do individually? What does that strategic process look like?

Greg Gifford  13:18

I mean, it depends on the size of your organization. If you've got a fairly large marketing team and a fairly large sales team, you don't want to put everybody in the room, because it's mass chaos. A lot of times, you just want those key decision-makers and leadership in the room.

Whether it's 30 minutes or whether it's half a day or a day, depends on what you're doing, and how much work there is and how much you have to suss out. We don't necessarily, at SearchLab, go through a whole year in advance. We know, pretty far ahead of time, which events we're going to have a table or a booth at, and we know, typically at least six months ahead of time, which events we're going to have a speaker. But, that doesn't mean we're going to plan out the whole year.

A lot of times, it's almost more like per quarter, because maybe it's, “Hey, this section of events is all automotive-focussed (because we have a lot of car dealer clients), so the marketing and sales messaging will all be around automotive for this section and time.” or, “Hey, we got a bunch of healthcare stuff coming up. Let’s do one healthcare push but, hey, we’ve got a couple of automotive shows in there, too. Let's do that.” or, “Hey, we're going to be at PubCon, and we've got two or three different speakers at PubCon in Austin next week. Let's do some marketing to just let people know ‘If you want to learn more about this, go to this session. You want to learn more about this, go to this session.’”

Again, for us – we do so many events, it is a little bit more centered on the events, and then we've got other marketing to support the time in between and the overarching things, and you've got the drip campaigns for people that have interacted with you and all that. For other businesses, maybe you're not as event-focused so it wouldn't take as much. You're talking more about, “Okay, we're creating some marketing (whether it's direct mail stuff or online digital marketing), and it needs to support our sales goals, and our sales goals are X and Y. So, what do we need to do to get there? What's that going to be?” Maybe you can handle that in 30 minutes. But, with us, we've got all the events, we've got all the speakers aside from the events, and we've got our regular marketing going on. It is a little bit more in-depth for us.

David Bain  15:27

What are some key metrics that your sales teams need to know about your marketing teams and what they're doing? And, also the other way around, what your marketing team needs to know about what your sales team is up to?

Greg Gifford  15:38

That's a great question. So, I'm a spreadsheet nerd. I love working in Google Sheets and in Excel. We basically will plug in to my plug-and-play budgeting/marketing/sales ideation sheet, to say, “Alright, what are our sales goals for the year? Okay, we know that we want to be at X million dollars in recurring revenue for SEO, and Y in recurring revenue for paid search at the end of this year. Here's where we're starting in both of those. So, if we want to get from X to Y, and from A to B, here's our standard close percentage on demos. Well, here's our standard demo percentage on leads (how many people will actually book and then show up for a demo off of the leads that we get), and then what's our close percentage of, for all the people that sit through a demo, how often are we closing them and it turns into business?”

So then we could do some really complicated math in there to say, “Alright, cool. If this is where we're starting, and here's where we want to end up, we know we need to sell this many. That number is Z. We need to sell Z number of new clients to get to our goal by the end of the year. We break that up by month – but we also have to account for churn because you are going to lose some clients here and there, especially now with the recession. People are very price-conscious, so you have to account for churn as well. Which then gives you a final number. It says, “Here’s how many you actually have to sell.” And if we know our lead to demo and demo to close percentage, that then also spits out a number of: “Okay, here's how many qualified leads you need to get.”

So now, at the beginning of year when we have our annual planning meeting, we plug in those goals and boom. It spits something out that says, “This is how many leads you need to get this year to hit your goals (assuming that churn is at a certain level, and your close percentage stays the same).” Then marketing can back into that and say, “We need to get this many leads. We've got data from previous years of – okay we've done a show. Here are the marketing strategies and tactics we've used around a particular event. Here is the lead output that we got out of that, the demo output of that, and the client output that we got out of that.” So now we can say, “Okay, cool. We're going back to this automotive conference in Tampa that we've done for the last several years. We know what our standard output is. If that's enough to meet our quota, or our goal for what we need to achieve for this year, then cool. We know we've done the things before; we could do them again and be successful.” Or, “Hey, maybe we need to juice it a little bit. We didn't get quite as many leads as we wanted last year, and we know we need to get more this year, so let's do these things to improve on our performance from last year.”

We're also taking a whole lot of notes at each event. We do really cool custom socks, we do hats, and we do some other cool swag giveaways depending on what vertical we're in. So, we track how many giveaway-merchandise-type things we're sending to each event and how many were left over at the end. We're tracking how many pieces of print collateral we have – because we have a brochure, we have a one sheet, we have a question sheet, and we typically will have some sort of a postcard to let people know what time somebody's speaking. We're tracking all of that, because it's not just: “Hey, let's order 200 for every event.”, it's: “Let's figure out the right number for that event, so we're not wasting money on specific things.

We know what we've done pre-show, we know during the show, and we know what we've done post-show. So, for us, it kind of becomes this machine of, like I said, it's just a constantly reiterative process of “What can we do to tweak and get a little bit better from what we did last time?”

David Bain  19:19

I thought, to begin with, you were leading to the age-old challenge between sales and marketing, of marketing saying, “Salespeople just aren't converting anything” and salespeople saying, “Marketing are just providing rubbish leads”.

Is that the most common argument between sales and marketing?

Greg Gifford  19:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You hear that all the time. It's when you have that walled garden, where the marketing team says, “Hey, it's just our job to get you leads.” and the sales team says, “You’ve got to get us good leads, because you can send us 100 leads a week but, if 95 of those are crap leads, you're only really giving us 5 leads a week.”

For us, that's really important and, in the annual planning meeting that we had in January this year, we spent a long time actually figuring out what our lead process is, and what do we count as just a lead, or a marketing-qualified lead, or a sales-qualified lead – because those are three different things. We want to make sure that the marketing team is sending qualified leads to the sales team, because otherwise, again, it's throwing the spaghetti at the wall: “Let's just do a bunch of marketing and we'll get some leads.”

It's the same thing that digital marketers say to their clients: “Oh, hey man, your lead count’s way up. If you're not selling more, that's not my problem.”, “Your SEO is working” or, “Your PPC is working.” But, no. It matters. Are they leads that are potential buyers? Or is it just a bunch of crap leads, and there's no way those people are ever going to buy? You have to think that way too, in your own internal systems. We want to make sure it's qualified leads, and we want to make sure that it has the potential to turn into business, or it's not really a lead.

David Bain  20:55

Now, not necessarily thinking about what we've been talking about so far with sales and marketing, what's the number one thing marketers need to incorporate into their strategy?

Greg Gifford  21:05

Man, I think the thing that I see that's wrong the most often, is people just think, “I have to do activities.” It's: “I need to be sending out an email. I need to be putting out stuff on social. I need to be doing SEO. I need to just create content for the sake of content. I need to create videos. I need to do all of these things that you see on other podcasts and webinars and read online.”

But it's not about doing a lot of activities. It's about making sure that the activities that you are doing are effective. With email marketing, a lot of people are like, “Oh, here's my email list. Let me send this message out.” No. Segment the list first. Send the appropriate marketing message to the people that are at the right part of their buying journey, so that it resonates with them. And they'll let you know, “Hey, yes, I am interested in talking to you about buying your product or service.”

That's where a lot of people miss out. They're just chunking out the same message – and even looking at paid ads on social. If you're going to pay for ads on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and TikTok and LinkedIn, and all the different places where you can buy ads – all ads are not created equal. The kind of ads that you put on TikTok don't necessarily work on Facebook, and those don't necessarily work the same on Instagram, and those don't work the same as Twitter ads, and that's not the same as your display and remarketing ads for your site.

You really have to be more specific and more purposeful in your marketing strategy, if you want to be successful.

David Bain  22:39

I’ve been your host, David Bain. You can find Greg Gifford over at SearchLabDigital.com and by checking out his own podcast, Suds & Search. Greg, thanks so much for being on the Strategic Marketing Show.

Greg Gifford  22:50

Hey, thanks for having me.

David Bain  22:53

And thank you for listening. Here at IFP, our goal is simple: to connect you with the most relevant information, to help solve your business problems, all in one place. InsightsForProfessionals.com.