The Secret to Sales & Marketing Success? A Shared Revenue Mindset

Elana Leoni:

Welcome, everyone to our podcast, All Things Marketing and Education. I'm Elana Leoni and I've devoted my entire career to helping education brands build their brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately grow their lead. Every week, my guests, who range from educators to EdTech entrepreneurs to experts in the field, will all share tips, strategies, and insight in either social media, content marketing, and community-building. I'm so excited to be your guide to help transform your marketing efforts into something that's truly authentic and consistently provides value for your audience. Enjoy.

Hello, friends. Welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. I'm your host, Elana Leoni, and today we're diving into a topic that doesn't nearly get enough attention, and I think it's because people don't like talking about it because it can be awkward. So we're going to be talking about how marketing and sales can truly align. We're all working in the same goals and we're not competing in the EdTech space. A lot of the times we often assume that sales and marketing teams naturally work together, kind of like peas and carrots. But the reality is that when you achieve that real collaboration, it takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of intentionality, curiosity, humbleness, and really a culture that helps you do that. So to help us break it all down, I am joined by my friend Dan O'Reilly, who was just humble enough to go along with a topic that people don't talk about because it's a little uncomfortable.

Dan is the founder of Fuel Sales, more commonly known as FuelK12. He brings over 35 years of experience in sales, with half of that time spent in EdTech, and he's led both sales and marketing. So he's led both hats. I've just done the marketing side and I've had different experiences there. So we get to share together, which is really, really fun. In this episode, we're tackling the common disconnects between sales and marketing, how you can foster collaboration between the two and really practical things. I keep honing in on this episode for all of you that say, "Okay, now what? How do I do this?" So really tactical steps that you can take to ensure both teams, marketing and sales are working towards shared goals.

So if you've ever felt tension, you are not alone, between these two essential elements within EdTech and really all organizations, this conversation is for you. Practical, strategic, even if you just want to have someone say, "Yes, that's my experience." This conversation is for you. So let's get into it. Welcome, everyone. We're so excited to have you join us for this last-minute, but very fun chat. I am excited to introduce my friend, Dan O'Reilly. Dan, why don't you introduce yourself to everyone? You can do a much more better job than myself.

Dan O'Reilly:

Sure. My name's Dan O'Reilly. I am the founder of a company called Fuel Sales, more commonly known as FuelK12. My background, I've been in sales a little over 35 years now, but half of that has been in the EdTech space. I've had the benefit of working on both sides of the house, whether it be in marketing or sales. I have led both teams in the past with EdTech companies, and so I've got a unique perspective into the topic we're going to be talking about today.

Elana Leoni:

Yes, and I'm very excited because I don't feel like people talk about this enough. I think people assume when you have a head of marketing and a head of sales, they work together and it just happens like unicorns and magic and then they all reach their goal, but you and I both know it doesn't necessarily work that way and it requires a level of intentionality and collaboration. So why don't we get into it, and I know this is a bigger question and we can just start and say, what are some best practices you've seen about marketing and sales when they come together, how do they align on common goals? Because sometimes we see them not fighting, but sometimes they have conflicting goals.

Dan O'Reilly:

That's a good way to say it. Yes. It happens on the regular because of the fact that what's happening in normal organizations as they grow, things tend to get siloed. You have leaders that start taking over and controlling one part of it, and it's just a natural thing. And you're right, you have to be more intentional to make sure that we're bringing things back together and leading in a collaborative way. And so I think when it comes to doing this in a way where the sales and marketing teams work together to see that better result, it means that it starts with the leadership. You have to have a good culture of collaboration and connection. I've worked in several organizations where you can tell there's tension between the groups and then the leaders are talking to their team around, "Well, it's marketing's fault, or you know what they think about things." And it's back on either side.

They're both blaming the other group for not reaching a specific goal for themselves. And you talked about goals and trying to have common or aligned goals. A lot of folks think of it in a way where they say, "Well, marketing has their set of goals and we will align those with what sales has as their set of goals." That is still not shared goals. If you said marketing has a certain goal towards marketing-qualified leads, for example, MQLs and marketing is going to generate X number of MQLs order to help sales reach their revenue goal, that is not a shared goal. That is not, because marketing owns the MQL goal and sales owns the revenue goal. Those two things are not shared. Does that make sense?

Elana Leoni:

Yeah, and it's helping me a bit because I work with select different EdTech companies and what I've been doing lately, which has been really fun, is working with the head of sales, and me acting as a fractional CMO or head of marketing, and we jump in together to create the plan, the go-to-market plan together, and we collectively determine, "All right, here's what we want to do together to get to these goals, MQLs, SQLs." But also being able to educate them on what's top of the funnel, how does brand awareness play into effect, what's that middle of funnel with engagement? So I think having that commonality of getting them to understand what marketing does too, that it's not just bottom of the funnel all the time, and that's one of the biggest conflicts I see with marketing and sales.

Dan O'Reilly:

If both marketing and sales were held to the exact same revenue goal, that is a shared goal. Then you have activities and things you do that support reaching that goal. And so if marketing is held to an MQL goal, they have leeway in there to just try to get a number and not necessarily a conversion into a sale. And the, "Oh, sales is responsible for the conversion and into revenue. We teed up all these deals for them and they just didn't do their job." And then sales looks back and says, "Well, they didn't give us good quality leads. They called them MQL, but that's baloney." So they blame each other for those things because they said, "I reached my goal." For example, "Marketing reached MQL goal." But if it doesn't turn into revenue, then marketing still is held accountable because of the fact that it's a shared revenue goal.

At the same time, you can look at sales leaders and say there's a conversion goal that is typically held in a marketing world where they're saying conversion to MQL to SQL type of setup, where you're saying, marketing is saying, "I have generated these leads and they've turned into an MQL, they converted into an SQL, they converted into..." You can share that goal as well through a revenue team and a marketing team. And you say the sales team has to have responsibility towards owning that goal together. And so sharing some of those things makes the conversation a better conversation. You're holding each other accountable, you're working mutually to achieve something. You respect the work that the other person is doing towards that and you're not siloing yourself and focusing only on a subset of a goal versus the greater goal. Am I explaining that okay?

Elana Leoni:

Yes. What you said in the beginning is sometimes it stems from the top in leadership, but also the culture in which the organization thrives. Because for example, one of the things that we never do in our organization is we never blame. If something doesn't go right, we get curious and we say, "Gosh, I wonder why that didn't work out. Let's talk about it." We never blame. But if you have a culture of just people covering their own and trying to figure out, "I'm going to make myself look good..." So how do we create this culture of collaboration so that these two, the head of marketing and the head of sales are besties, they're good friends, they respect each other, they've got-

Dan O'Reilly:

Oh, they're besties. Yeah. Again, it's back to again, you were talking about leadership and sharing goals and making sure they're all on the same page, but I like the fact that you were talking about, you're this fractional CMO working with the sales leader and you guys are coming together to come up with the same goals together. It's not just one team saying, "This is a revenue goal. What are you going to do to help us?" Or, "This is the MQL goal. Figure out your revenue goal from it." You guys are coming together and working on those same things together to decide, what are the tactics and activities and work that you're going to do to get to that number? Is it reasonable? Can we all do that together? Can we help with that side of it? Right?

Elana Leoni:

Yeah. And doing it collaboratively gives you shared ownership so it doesn't feel as much pressure on the marketing team, at least, where I'm like, "Wow, we decided on this collectively, this may not be our best shot. We need the data to really adjust and go forward." But it doesn't feel like, "Hey, marketing, do all the work and if it doesn't work, you're getting fired." It was very like, "All right, we've got a plan. Let's trust each other. Let's have communication. Let's figure out what works. But we're both on board with this plan."

Dan O'Reilly:

Yeah, absolutely. The other side of it too is, there's got to be a consistent level of communication. There's got to be this, set up a Slack channel between the two and make sure that you guys are communicating on a regular basis, set meetings on a regular cadence to look at progress and make sure, "Are we doing the things that we need to do? Is anything slipping from the process that we put in place, or are we achieving the leading indicators that'll tell us that we're going to be reaching our goals?" So being able to sit at a table together and talk about these things in a consistent pattern instead of just like, "Hey, let's meet once a quarter and just see where we are." It should be much more frequent than that.

Even to the point where I was talking about, if you had a Slack channel where you share ideas and keep progress on a regular basis, you have the ability to connect anytime you want and talk through some of those things, but also being able to say, "Can we have a bi-weekly meeting? Can we have, at the very minimum, a monthly meeting where we're looking back on the last month, we're seeing the work that we did, what the results were, are the metrics that we've defined for this, are they still holding true? Is there anything else that we have to do to adjust? How can we help each other continue to reach that goal?" Because we're both on the same team, it should feel like.

Elana Leoni:

Yes. And for those cultures that maybe don't have that yet, the idea of meeting regularly and checking in on progress of goals might sound stressful and create panic attacks of people, because they don't have that culture yet, but knowing that you're just checking in and together, trying to help each other and share what's working and not, you will both get better together, but it's just a switch. And how do we change the, oh my gosh, pressure to blame to curiosity and collaboration, right?

Dan O'Reilly:

Yeah. I like how you say that, "We don't blame, we get curious." One of the most important things that I learned over the years was not to fear the failure, that we should not be in a situation where there is this blame feel or, "You got it wrong." And that leads to inaction, that leads to people being fearful of doing things. And so what needs to happen is that the whole company has to have more of this, "We don't fear failure. We focus on taking action and learning from the mistakes that we make."

It's better to drive forward and execute, as opposed to holding back and worrying about whether we're going to get it right and over-analyzing every little thing, as opposed to taking the step and making sure that you've put enough room in there for measurement and being able to then step back and say, "Well, you know what? We tried, it failed. What went wrong? What went right? How can we make that better? Let's take the next step." As long as we're always moving forward and learning from the things that we didn't accomplish the way we were hoping for, that's the goal. That's the goal.

Elana Leoni:

And I'm head-nodding. I wanted to snap, but I know that would mess up the audio. I'm like, "Yes, yes." Inaction is the worst thing you can do for the fear of failure, and you will fail. You may not perform on lots of things because a lot of the things you're doing are educated guesses because the market is moving incredibly quickly, especially right now. Marketers are constantly trying to figure out what's the product market fit? How do we align with the priorities of the budget that are constantly changing under ambiguous circumstances? How does sales position themselves as a must-have in this market? There's all of these things, so we don't have answers. We have educated guesses and we need to try and get some data behind it.

So I was like, "Yes, yes, yes." So circle back on some tactical things. So you talked about a couple of things, to when people are just getting started and they're trying to figure out how to align marketing and sales, and you said, "Let's make sure marketing and sales are meeting regularly. Let's make sure they have a Slack channel open. Let's make sure that they have this culture of being curious and sharing, and that shared accountability." Is there anything else you would add around just some tactical things to really get it in the culture, but what are those other best practices or did we cover them all?

Dan O'Reilly:

Well, one of the things I've seen work really well for the folks that are struggling in that area, where they've started to grow apart and they want to find their way back together and say, "Hey, we realize that there's a problem here and we need to align better." Also, this holds true for the folks that are just getting started down this path. And if the group that said, "We do need a marketing department now separate from sales, and we need a..." However that starts to form, and want to then make sure that they're starting off on the right foot in a very collaborative way, one of the exercises that I've found really super helpful in this area is doing a customer journey mapping exercise, where you can really sit down together and walk through, "How does a customer find us? How do they go through the process of learning about us, and then moving through the sales process into close? And even beyond that into close, implementation, customer success, becoming an advocate for us. How do all of those things happen? What are the steps and stages along the way?"

And you start to respect the work of the two different groups, the journey that this customer is taking. You start to see, "What's the buying process? They haven't learned about us yet. Look at the work and effort that marketing is doing to try to drive awareness around the things that are happening there. And as they begin to become aware and move into that consideration and step through that, look at the work that sales is doing to try to capture that and move them into a closed opportunity." So you start to have this mutual respect around what's happening, and you also understand the touchpoints where there's handoffs that are very critical, and the reason why those things are super critical.

For example, when a lead comes inbound, marketing has done a lot of work to nurture that opportunity and it comes inbound, and then sales needs to take that and continue to run with it. And so sometimes there's a drop, and you get a chance to see that touchpoint where the two organizations come together and work together to try to achieve the same goal. And you can talk about, "What are the things that are the challenges there on our side? What kind of data do we need to make sure we provide you with the really quality leads? What kind of work needs to happen on your end and why?" Those type of conversations help to open things up a little bit and make people feel like, "Okay, being more collaborative and more connected and respecting the work each other, we're doing really opens up the relationship a little bit better." So I've seen that work really well.

Elana Leoni:

Yes, and I'm so glad you mentioned that because I'm going to just put my marketing hat on, is that even when I work collaboratively with sales, it is a bit of a journey, unintended, to get them to understand the value and how much time it takes to really cultivate that brand awareness and that engagement. And we're building trust in between there and then, especially within EdTech, those sales cycles are really long, and the touchpoints are a lot depending on where we're at in the buying cycle within K12 too. So doing that exercise helps them reframe and say, "Okay, here's that journey." And it does it in a collaborative way, rather than just saying, "Well, awareness is good too, and engagement." You're not fighting for it, you're doing it. I love that. Love it.

Dan O'Reilly:

Yeah. I think the benefit where I was talking about my background, I have a heavy demand generation level of experience, so I'm not the brand marketer or any of that side of the house, but when it comes to the tactical demand generation work, I was selling an email marketing tool, me in my past, and the way that I got paid was the more that the client used the tool, the more I got paid for my commission. So I had to learn all about lead generation tactics and email marketing best practices and landing pages and all those things. My first real job in EdTech was leading a marketing team, and it was all, I had the SDR team as well, which is, by the way, just to interject around this, you do have this when it comes to the SDR team, sales development rep, those are the professional prospectors, basically.

They kind of hover in between the two groups. They can land in both areas and support both sides. And so they become a great opportunity to connect the dots between the two, because a lot of the things that the sales team will complain about that is requested by marketing is about a speedy response to things and engaging with the leads that they're sending and things of that nature. Well, if you put that SDR team in place, now you have the team that's going to engage on behalf of marketing for sales as well, and do the things that marketing really wants to be done and sales really doesn't want to do, or feels like they don't have the right or time to do it. So anyway, that has helped a lot. But when I was in that marketing role, I saw and felt so much that feeling from sales, where it was like, as a marketer and a demand generation specialist on this side, I needed the data.

I need to understand what's happening so that I can perform at a better rate and give them the value of the role that I was playing. And you could see that tension where it was like, "I don't want to do some of that stuff, and I don't want to fill out the database, and I don't want to update the records. And what does it matter about timing to get a response? You're not sending me a good lead. It doesn't matter when I reach out." So it is super important to have that connection with that journey map conversation, where people start to really understand that in a good way.

Elana Leoni:

Let's talk about data. You mentioned data. Data is really only as good as it's designed and set up to be tracked. And most companies that I work with generally don't have, and what I've seen in the EdTech industry, even, unless they're e-commerce and have an angle there, they generally don't have attribution models set up. And for those of you thinking about, "What's an attribution model? You're getting fancy." It's not really that fancy, but it's just about, we know when a lead touches, you have multiple touchpoints before they get to a sale or before they become an SQL or an MQL. They have multiple touchpoints. And a lot of times it happens in that awareness phase where marketing is, and they might stay there for years, they might download five eBooks and they might comment on all of your social media posts, and it takes a while to build it up.

So what an attribution model will do is start weighing that, and there's so many different models of attribution models, but a very simple one is, what's the first touch that comes in, what's that middle touch, and what's the last touch? And then we weigh that. Maybe the first touch is worth 25% of the deal close, and the end is 50%, whatever it may be. But then that gives marketing a little bit of like, "Hey, I helped and here's my data." But so often, we don't have that, so we're left going, "It just works. Trust us."

Dan O'Reilly:

Yeah, right. "It's working, so just trust." And that's just not the way it needs to be. It needs to be very data-driven and the ability to report back on what worked and what didn't so we can continue to get better. Even going to conferences and being able to say, "That conference was valuable." It's important. Can't just go to the conference and walk away from it. You got to tag all the leads that came from it. You got to do this. There's a lot of work that goes into all of those things.

Elana Leoni:

Yes, and oh my God, let's talk about conferences. Sometimes people think that that might just be sales and that's their role, but what I do is, I work hand-in-hand with the sales team and say, "Okay, let's get you all ready. Let's make sure you've got your calendar set up. What's your approach for meetings? How many meetings do you have set up? How can I help you schedule those meetings? Let's make sure that everyone knows about us speaking and our booth strategy and our beyond the booth strategy." But we're doing it together and we're getting ready together. And it's not like, "I'm doing my thing, you're doing yours." Sometimes you see the sales guy and they're just busy all day, and then they come in when they can. But it starts with collaboration and a process to support that.

Dan O'Reilly:

Absolutely. Couldn't agree more.

Elana Leoni:

Sorry, I know we're preaching to the choir to each other. So we talked a little bit about metrics, of making sure that they're shared metrics, MQLs, SQLs, and maybe sales even starts valuing higher-level things in terms of awareness and engagement. And maybe we even have a basic attribution model. And by the way, Google now supports it. It's a very basic attribution model. You can turn it on and just say, "Here's some things." No one really has a comprehensive CRM system that integrates in with social and all the things. You can do it. It's expensive, but it's better than nothing. So get some data and use it. Are there any other metrics that you would think of?

Dan O'Reilly:

No, you're hitting on a lot of the right ones. I'm just saying, there's stages to all this stuff, right? You can be at the top level and have all these pieces of the puzzle, but what's the bare minimum that you really want to be able to do so that you can start to see what's working and what's not? And part of it is just the attribution side of it. It is at least tagging where that lead came from. How did that lead end up in a meeting with me to talk about this opportunity? As a salesperson, we should be tagging that stuff at the bare minimum, that last attribution. And it's not just, "I reached out and I called them." There's so many different reasons or why, and there's people that make mistakes with their reporting where they'll just put a blank field and say, "Write something in there."

And it's like, how do I measure something if everybody's going to write something different? I have to have some ability to bundle things together. And so you have to pick from a list of options and you have to make those fields something that can be measured, things like that. So there's different ways to think about the metrics and the things, and how to report. For example, too, I always talk about trending reporting and seeing things on a trend. I don't know how many times I've gone into an organization to look at the reporting that they do, and the reporting that the leadership is looking at is a moment in time, just, "How are things going today?" They open up this dashboard and you just see numbers today. You don't see where they were and how they got to where they were.

You don't get to see the work and effort that's gone into, and how the growth has gone over the last couple of months, over the last... And that's important in marketing and in sales, where you do have to look at, is that number better than the last month? Is it lower than last month? It's not just, look at a number and go, "I like that number. That's a really, really good number." It's, "Are we doing better? Are we improving? Are we making progress in that area?" And then also having a line where your goal is, to say, "Are we above the goal, and not just a number?" And I see that a lot, it's just a number.

Elana Leoni:

And I know we're talking about the relationship between marketing and sales, but it's also a shout out that if you're a head of marketing, if you're a head of sales, you should have your own professional learning network of heads of marketing and heads of sales.

Dan O'Reilly:

Oh, sure.

Elana Leoni:

And you do that at conferences and just being in the industry, but that allows you to benchmark too. So you can say, "Hey, Joe, how's it going? Are you seeing a downtime like us too?" Because if you're just looking at comparatively quarter by quarter, we know that it's dramatically different in Q3 and Q4 for example, and especially as it aligns to the buying and purchasing cycle. So being able to benchmark with your peers is really critical. And sharing information that's not proprietary, but being able to just say, "Hey, is it just me? Are you all seeing this too?"

Dan O'Reilly:

Yep. Yep. And just looking at different, if you want to get deep into the metric side of things and talk a little bit more about that side of it, there's lots of things we can look at. We talked a little bit about the fact that the sooner that someone engages with a lead, the more likely they are to turn that into an opportunity and continue the sales process. And so we can tee up data like that and see, what was the time to engage, how long did they stay in a stage? Things of that nature that will help us to identify where we can improve and get better with things. Especially like conference leads, man, you go to that conference and you're not following up after it pretty quickly, that slowly diminishes your ability to even have an engagement with that person from that point forward. So being able to have that data to show our teams, this impacts the outcome.

Elana Leoni:

That drives me crazy, when people don't follow up after conferences because we spend so much money and time going to conferences and getting this face time, and sales is overwhelmed, and that's where marketing can come in and help too. So they can immediately start doing some sequences to follow up and buy some time and just say, "Hey, by the way, you met with us and here are some really good valuable resources." Don't go for the hard sale. Let's pass it off to you once you have time to jump in and have a personalized meeting.

Dan O'Reilly:

I'll continue to go back to this journey mapping conversation because it is the area where each group has the opportunity to talk about those different touchpoints, the challenges they have, the current situation that they're in, and how they have the opportunity to work together to make it a better situation. Because you're right, half the time the things that marketing is doing can be supported and done in a better way by sales, where they struggle, and vice versa. The things that sales is doing that marketing needs help with, they can jump in and help sales as well. And so it's like, "How do we support each other to get the best possible results out of this, and how do we actually understand each other and their needs so that we can get the best results?"

Again, starting at the leadership level and saying, "We need to collaborate and we need to have this environment, this culture of collaboration and support. It is not a siloed organization anymore." And then being able to follow through with that, by connecting with each other and meeting on a regular basis and supporting. It just has to happen.

Elana Leoni:

If you do not feel safe enough to innovate, safe and supported, you won't ever take chances and risks, and what you're going to do is play safe, and then you're going to blame and stick to your plan. And then that doesn't help anybody. And I'm thinking about when relationships go wrong between heads of marketing and heads of sales and say one of them gets let go because of budget and they're not performing because they're not collaborating, that just hurts the company. Budgets are tight because they're not selling, but the worst thing you can do is fire heads of marketing, because then you don't have the inbound and you only have one channel now, you're reaching out to people on.

Dan O'Reilly:

Right, right. That's exactly right. You can feel that, as soon as there's any contention, the sides tend to close down and become more siloed, that when someone says, "Hey, I don't like what's happening over here," and that if they don't do that in a constructive way, then people pull back into their silos and they start pointing, and that's what it turns into. You talk about the blame game, everybody's blaming everybody else and they're not taking the action they need to to really resolve the issue and get their organization into a better place.

Elana Leoni:

That is true-

Dan O'Reilly:

Culture, culture, culture.

Elana Leoni:

I know, we even talk about it when we talk about, how do we build emotionally intelligent human beings in K-12 with social and emotional learning? We are talking about creating a thriving workplace that really values all parts of it, but encourages collaboration, and more than collaboration, deep curiosity, and that's what's got to fuel you. And when it works, when I see heads of marketing and sales in tandem, it's just beautiful. But when it doesn't work, it collapses. It's like the exact opposite.

Dan O'Reilly:

Yep, yep. I have found that a lot of the organizations are somewhere in between. When I engage with a company, I don't see people completely collapsed and not working really well together, but boy, do I see contention, and boy, do I see a lot of frustration. And so it's not working ideally, each side is doing the best they possibly can, but they're not working together. And if they just took that one extra step, it's almost exponential change that can happen instead of this one plus one equals two. It's like, "We can really up our game if we just stop blaming, stop being in our silos and we engage with each other." It's amazing what a difference it can make.

Elana Leoni:

And not to complicate things, because I think sometimes it's good for us to have this simplistic approach and it's like, "Oh, good for you guys to say, you're outside of the workplace." But no, we've seen it. We've been in it. I'm still in it, but at the same time, I know it's a little more complicated. For example, if I've got a company and I've got five different product lines, and maybe they all have different sales teams, and those sales teams might even be competing somewhat with each other, and they only have one marketing team, that marketing team has to work with all of them, but they don't have enough resources to. But if your head of sales and your head of marketing have a plan at the get-go and define the plan, they won't be confused or fighting for marketing resources.

It's just, how do we be proactive instead of reactive and communicate? But that's the number one thing I see, is that sometimes with bigger companies too, it's like, "We've got all sorts of things to market. Why aren't you marketing my stuff?" That's the big one. Do you see anything else in terms of just common challenges between the two, besides the things we've already talked about?

Dan O'Reilly:

Yeah, I think we've hit on a lot of the common things. When I get in there, a lot of the times what I'll do is, I'll sit down and I'll assess and I'll interview and spend some time with the different groups to engage with them and learn what their experience has been. And no matter what the problems are, it's not their fault. No matter what's happening or why I have been asked to come in and engage, it's always, "If it wasn't for..." It's always the point.

It's not like, "Hey, together we're struggling at this or we can't seem to get..." It's never a we thing, it's a they thing. And I hate talking in extremes, but that's the common thing that you run into, is that it has festered like a bad relationship, where they start pulling back from each other and blaming and listing all the faults of the other person and saying, "These things are not great," because they haven't found a way to connect and collaborate and be held accountable under a very shared experience. They don't think of themselves as the same group working towards a common goal. They just say, "My job is to do this, so I'm going to go do this, and you can go do your job."

Elana Leoni:

Yes. And we've talked about some really practical ways to reset too. Sometimes when you're starting out as a new head of marketing or a new head of sales, I love the best practice of them doing listening tours and really talking to every single person as much as they can in the organization, and understanding what they think the challenges are, and resetting. But then starting with what you said, those consistent behaviors. It doesn't help you to just meet once a quarter. That's going to not be collaborative, but you said consistent. Maybe they're bi-weekly meetings, maybe it's an open Slack channel, whatever it may be.

I love, "How do we reset?" Or if you're starting fresh, literally start fresh and start with these meetings. Start with curiosity. What would you say? I know we can talk about this for ages, but I hope people that are listening can head-nod because this is something that people don't talk about because it's like, "Oh, that's a little bit of contention." We know this tension exists, but we know if we collaborate well, we can achieve a lot more. But what would be maybe one piece of advice, if you're like, "If you don't do anything, please consider doing this. This will help propel you," and I think I know what you're going to say, but to get that collaboration going?

Dan O'Reilly:

Well, I don't think that there's... Shared goals makes a huge impact on the outcome of things because when you force two people to carry the same quota, carry the same goal, and you sink or swim together, they're forced to collaborate whether they want to or not. And so when the top leadership at the CEO level says, "This is how we're going to run this ship, and it is all under shared goals, and if we as an organization do not reach this revenue goal, both of you are accountable to that. And so you both need to come together and figure it out."

They're going to have to figure it out together. So that, to me is like, if you don't do that, you're always going to be in the mode of, "I got my goal, you got your goal. I have the ability to re-silo myself. Even if we want to talk about talking together and collaborating together, I've got a goal I need to focus on, so I'm going to focus on that goal." It's not a shared experience. It's not a shared goal that we're trying to achieve together. So that, I think is important. And then the journey mapping experience is always going to be something that I would say should be revisited on an annual basis.

They should be looking at this stuff and going through that exercise. I think it's an opportunity to step away from the office, sit down and engage in that conversation and take the proper amount of time to really investigate the different channels where people come inbound and the different engagements that they have with folks, the different touchpoints along that path all the way through, because just again, it creates this mutual respect for where people are, the role that they play in the journey that the customer takes across our plate, basically.

And it also opens the door to conversations where we say, "Well, that part of the road is rocky and it's rocky because of these challenges. Let's stop for a minute and talk about how we can pave that out and smooth it out," and then the two teams can work together to agree on how they're going to make that a better transition or a better approach or a better whatever, and then they keep moving. So that, to me, that exercise is ultimately one of the best things to do to reset or re-center a group and it should be done on an annual basis.

Elana Leoni:

Yes, that's what I thought you were going to say, is journey mapping, but I love how you started with shared goals, because you can't get anywhere if you don't have shared goals. Then once you do journey mapping, then you're stoked and you're like, "Hey, let's create some shared personas. Let's do some ideal customer profiles, ideal customer avatars, and align it to the buying cycle. And maybe we do an ecosystem of, who are all the players that make decisions for our unique product or service? Then let's get nerdy and craft a plan together." I get excited about this when it's right, you know?

Dan O'Reilly:

Yeah, and you can sit down and customer journey map, but if you walk away from that with different goals, you're eventually going to be siloed again. And so it really does have to start in a place where everybody agrees that we're all shooting for the same thing and we're holding each other accountable to get there, and it does make that journey mapping conversation even more effective when everybody's on the same page about that.

Elana Leoni:

Awesome. Well, I will leave our conversation at that mic drop moment, I feel like. So thank you so much for your time. For those people listening, how can they get a hold of you? How do they want to learn more from you? I feel like you have such tactical but inspirational tidbits at times, so how can they learn more from you?

Dan O'Reilly:

If they want to reach out to me directly, my email address is dano@gofuelsales.com and dano@gofuelsales.com, or you can just go to gofuelsales.com and learn about the different things we can do and we have a Contact Us there that people can jump in and engage with us there.

Elana Leoni:

Awesome. Thank you so much for your time and in exploring a topic that people just don't talk about. I'm glad that we got to. For those of you listening, I hope you took away at least a couple of things that you can do or at least think differently about as you start embarking on, what's that relationship between sales and marketing? So thanks everybody. We'll see you next time.

Dan O'Reilly:

Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

Elana Leoni:

Thanks again for listening to All Things Marketing and Education. If you like what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can find more episodes at leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcast. You can also continue the conversation with us on Twitter @LeoniGroup, or on LinkedIn. And don't forget, if you enjoyed today's show, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review. We're so appreciative of every single subscriber and review we get, and it helps us reach even more people that need help. So we'll see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care.