Sales and Marketing Alignment

Aligning Sales and Marketing in B2B

Explore the integration of sales and marketing efforts in the B2B landscape in this episode of The Future of B2B Marketing podcast. Our panel of experts discusses practical strategies for improving collaboration between these traditionally separate departments.

Our Guests:

Ali Hussain, Senior Vice President of Strategy at The Marketing Practice, examines the challenges of aligning different departmental metrics and introduces the four 'Rs' as a potential common ground.

Emanuela Mathieu, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Forgerock, talks about the effectiveness of the 'pod' structure for teamwork and the necessity for mutual understanding and communication.

Guests

Emanuela Mafteiu, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Forgerock

Ali Hussain, Senior Vice President of Strategy for The Marketing Practice

Joaquin Dominguez - [00:00 - 00:42]

Okay. Welcome to another episode of The Future of B2B Digital Marketing podcast. Today we delve into the pivotal but often misunderstood realm of marketing and sales alignment in B2B. We have Ali and Emanuela experts who will share insights on breaking down silos, the complexities of information and key metrics that drive success. So even though we have a roadmap, expect the conversation to unlock deeper insights as we go along. Let's start with with a quick round of introductions. Emmanuela, do you want to go first?

Emanuela Mafteiu - [00:42 - 01:11]

Sure. Thank you, Joaquin. Hello, I'm Emanuela Mateo, senior digital marketing manager at Forgerock. I specialize in leveraging data driven strategies to craft compelling brand stories and drive business growth. I am passionate about adapting the ever evolving digital landscape to keep brands at the forefront of their industry. This is me.

Joaquin Dominguez - [01:11 - 01:13]

Thank you, Ali.

Ali Hussain - [01:13 - 01:29]

Hi, I'm Ali Hussein. I'm senior vice president of strategy at the Marketing Practice. We're the world's leading independent B2B tech agency, and I get to look after a team of fantastic and talented strategists work with the world's biggest tech clients. Lovely to be here today.

Joaquin Dominguez - [01:29 - 01:33]

Thank you. And Tom.

Tom Gatten - [01:33 - 01:39]

Hi, my name is Tom Gatton. I'm the chief executive and founder of Adzact a B2B first ad platform.

Joaquin Dominguez - [01:39 - 02:08]

And I'm Joaquin Dominguez and I'm head of marketing of Adzact. And I work with Tom, of course. All right. So let's move on. Let's start with with the first segment that we will discuss today, which is about the urgency of sales and marketing alignment. So, Ali Emanuela, what makes this alignment so crucial in today's B2B landscape?

Ali Hussain - [02:08 - 02:09]

Emanuela, after you.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [02:09 - 02:45]

Thanks, Ali. The fact that we need to win together, grow the business together so sales and marketing needs to be like ying and Yang. We need to be connected. We need to communicate. And there's also the power of the pod. This is how we call it. Basically us working together as a team. This is the only way that everything is coming together. And even if we're talking about, you know, digital campaigns or creatives and everything, this is like.

Tom Gatten - [02:45 - 02:55]

Cross-departmental little project or ongoing teams. Is that the idea? That is the idea. And STR Salesperson.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [02:55 - 03:18]

Absolutely, yeah. Like a Tiger team, if you may. So this is how we have to be and come together like as one. So it's very important and obviously, um, conversations with different Buyers Committee. So it's all about the account insights that's really important. And that comes from sales basically. Um, but yeah.

Ali Hussain - [03:18 - 05:03]

Yeah, I agree with what emanuela just said. I mean, if you know, if no matter the size of your organization, if your sales and marketing teams aren't aligned, then effectively you're going to be wasting resources, losing out on potential revenue opportunities and also missing out on a chance to learn through feedback loops. So what are marketing learning that sales could could use and what are sales learning and marketing could use? And I think it's particularly urgent now because of the changing buyer journey. So as the buyer journeys are elongated a little bit, but also more and more online, there's kind of an increasingly large overlap in the buyer journey between parts where marketing involved and the parts where sales tend to take more of a lead. And so I think that's that's made the sales and marketing alignment question even more pressing today and probably continue to be even more pressing into the future. We actually did a little bit of research on this because the sales marketing effectiveness gap, as we sometimes call it, is obviously a long term theme. But as we've just said, it's become even more pressing recently. And we found that kind of marketing leaders. So those marketers, you tend to outperform their peers, go beyond the kind of mutual respect and general collaboration into having a single common plan working as one team and being really strongly collaborative and having kind of a level of empathy and understanding instead. So that's, you know, circumstantial data. It's self-reported, but I do think it reflects some of the pattern that we do see in our work, which is the more aligned sales and marketing become across this elongated buyer journey, the more effective their efforts are.

Tom Gatten - [05:03 - 05:50]

So I had a book recommended to me years ago called Blueprint Blueprints for a SaaS sales organization by a chap called Van der van der Gaag and Jaco van der Kuijp. Not sure quite how to pronounce that. And that was yeah, that was where I was introduced to the concept of a pod in. But I don't think and this is basically he was a very Silicon Valley orientated book, you know, focused on what the latest Silicon Valley companies were doing. But obviously back in like 2016 or something quite some time ago. But I don't think I've ever met a company that's actually adopted Pods. I'd love to hear more about that because that's like the distillation of what you were just saying, Ali and theory.

Ali Hussain - [05:50 - 05:58]

Think you've not met two and one call, Tom. That's a good start. eManuela. Don't ask.

Tom Gatten - [05:58 - 06:04]

That question. So tell us about that. Yeah. What is that about? How it works, what it actually feels like in practice.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [06:04 - 08:07]

Um, it's very challenging. So this is if I have to describe it is, is very challenging because we are, of course, different people. We are wired differently and everyone within that team, as you said, the SDR, the marketing operations and everyone comes together to work on a main main project or main campaign for example. So let's take account based marketing. For instance, we have this, you know, we're, we're, we're either doing a 1 to 1 or a one to few campaigns, and we just need to bring ourselves into that team. And we all have to be accountable and responsible for our areas. And this is the only way that this pod will work. And as I said, it's been very challenging getting that communication flow within the team and bringing us, you know, together and aligned and yeah, guess it's down to because we're wired differently. We have different goals, we're measured differently as well. So this is when it comes to be more complex. But yeah, we're, we're definitely using, we have seen some positive, um, positives working together. But at the beginning when we first started this project, this campaign, it was very difficult to get points across and obviously everyone brings in their own personality and oh yes, we want to change this. And usually us and marketing is like, um, when we originally started, the program's like, yeah, we, we are the creative people. We're like, you know, we need to come up with the creatives and the campaign concepts and everything. So a lot of pressure. But um, yeah, I would say it's an interesting way of working and at the end of it it just brings people together and perspectives and we kind of, we care about, um, you know, each other's as said, the way we're measured is differently sales and marketing, but we come and find a common ground, which is amazing to see. Emanuela Mafteiu - [08:07 - 08:09]

So this is my experience.

Joaquin Dominguez - [08:09 - 08:18]

Did you start like with the whole marketing and sales department working together or did you find advocates, small groups of people?

Tom Gatten - [08:18 - 08:20]

The idea of a pod is that it's small groups, right?

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [08:20 - 08:21]

It's like.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [08:21 - 09:31]

Yeah, okay. We basically have one person of each department and coming together. Yeah, you work with. So at the beginning you work with a sponsor. So you find someone within the sales team that is a sponsor that believes in a project. And originally, you know, account based marketing has marketing in the middle. So yeah, it was very difficult to educate. Like, okay, yeah, it is marketing, but it also sales and marketing. So think about it, what we can do, we can conquer the world together. So yeah, at the beginning it was challenging to get everyone on the same page and everyone responsible and accountable and kind of to bring in, as I said, our own personalities and our own ideas and to to go back to the metrics and analytics, it was very much like, you know, are we reaching the revenue targets and and going by that? Because at the end of the day, this is what we want to do. We want to grow the business. And that's why I said winning together means everything. So going back to to your original question, and we wanted to to win. They want to win. So let's just form a Tiger team and win together.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [09:31 - 09:34]

Yeah.

Joaquin Dominguez - [09:34 - 10:56]

I think what you described with the with the pod, it has a. A background in the knowledge management for innovation theory. And that pod is called Communities of Practice. So communities of practices are groups of people with shared motivations and ideally communities of practices are self-generated. For example, in my previous company, we created one to improve the culture of the organization, and it was a group of people that we started meeting once a week and then people started to join us. And and I don't know if you are familiar with the diffusion of innovations, but diffusion of innovations follow an S-curve. Um, so you start with the, um, with the innovators, then the early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards and, and in each stage you use communities of practices in a, in a different way. So at the beginning with the with the innovators, they would typically be interested in sharing ideas that are shaping a new innovation. Then with the early adopters, it's like emmanuella coming.

Tom Gatten - [10:56 - 11:02]

Exactly. I want to do being an evangelist for that.

Joaquin Dominguez - [11:02 - 11:43]

Exactly. Then with the with the early adopters, with typically it's the most important group in the organization to to in the adoption. That's when the curve starts to grow. You need to show best practices and evidence that the innovation is working and then you continue working with the early majority, late majority, and there are always laggards that never engage with, with the innovation. Um, but yeah, I wanted to mention that, that, that this idea of working in small has um, a theory in the, in the communities of practices and did you diffusion.

Tom Gatten - [11:43 - 11:50]

Did you see that Ali did you see that kind of or maybe it's just always been you've always been working in pods.

Ali Hussain - [11:50 - 13:36]

Definitely. Well I think I think it's a lovely, lovely reference to bring in. I think there are also a couple of fundamental truths around it as well. Um, there may be a broader and one is that people tend to work better in relatively small teams. So, you know, we're now a relatively large business of several hundred people have been for a few years. Our clients can have thousands, tens of thousands of people working for them. And it's hard to work in a team of 50,000 people, but it's considerably easier and more effective and more rewarding, often to be able to also work in a team of much, much smaller numbers, whether that's, you know, ten, 20, 25 people. And there's some interesting social psychology around that. And, you know, there isn't like a particularly convincing magic number, but a smaller team of people that you get to work with regularly and develop relationships with and ways of working with understanding and empathy with is just a really solid way of organizing a group of people to accomplish your goals. I think there's that. And then there's also what I find really attractive and really compelling about organizing into these small teams, really cool pod squads, scrums. That's a slight, slightly loose definition of the term. Organizing into these small teams of bringing different skills together has a couple of benefits. Firstly, I strongly believe you can't really solve any modern marketing challenge without bringing a range of different skills together. You might need somebody to have a look at the data for you. You might need somebody to understand what's going on from a targeting point of view or from a positioning point of view. What's happening in terms of the creative delivery, as Emanuela mentioned, you know, what's going on, different digital channels or how can your SDR bring in insights from having spoken to the customers? Ali Hussain - [13:36 - 15:10]

All of these things kind of need to be brought in. That's not to say that there is always one magic set that always has to solve every problem. There are lots of ways to solve any problem, but nonetheless, I think it's really useful to have this multidisciplinary approach and also as well as bringing a range of skills, it's also the perspectives. So there's a lovely book called Rebel Ideas by Matthew Sayeed, and one of the things he talks about is exploring the problem space. So if you imagine the problem space as a, as a as a, you know, an area, say a football pitch, if you have a small number of left backs, they're all going to congregate on one part of the football pitch. And sorry if this analogy isn't making any sense. People don't know football. Essentially a bunch of people all play in the same position are probably going to be in a similar position. But if you branch that out with by bringing a diverse range of people and diversity across lots of axes, then you can explore essentially more of the problem space and are likely to see more potential solutions as well. So I think that's that's the two reasons why I find just at a very fundamental level the idea of small. Disciplinary teams is a really compelling, compelling way of organizing people to me. So, yes, to your question, Tom Thomas, we, um, we organize in three ways actually. So we organize in pods ourselves internally as an agency, but then with clients as well, we organize in small teams, which are sometimes called pods, sometimes something else. Um, but again, very much the same principle. Bringing people together from ourselves, from our agency, from different departments within the client to come together to, to help solve whatever challenge it is that we're looking to solve.

Tom Gatten - [15:10 - 15:31]

So then from the client's perspective, they would have to, as Joaquin said, organize along these lines. To get the best out of you as an agency to get the best. So they're sort of, you know, that won't be something that their boss is telling them to do necessarily. That's them getting together and saying, okay, well, this is the best way to organize around this particular channel.

Ali Hussain - [15:31 - 16:19]

Yes, I suppose I've never come across a client who said, Isn't it great that we're incredibly siloed? Yeah. So to some extent I think they have to organize that way to get the best out of themselves. And to a Emanuela's point, there is maybe not an edge case, but a leading case here of ABM and the great magic of ABM when it works really well is how it aligns a bunch of people around a common goal, you know, whether that's a single account and kind of 1 to 1 ABM or a bunch of accounts and one to few or more, that idea that actually people can ideally share incentives, as Manmadha said, sometimes there's a lot of tension when people don't share those incentives, but actually can help you set common targets, shared targets for the team and bring people.

Tom Gatten - [16:19 - 16:27]

Do you have like particular particular industry themes like this Pod is responsible for financial services. This pod is responsible for targeting.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [16:27 - 16:28]

Yeah.

Ali Hussain - [16:28 - 16:34]

You mean in internally within the agency or in our work with clients on particular programs?

Tom Gatten - [16:34 - 16:53]

Well, with the clients, I kind of get that what you're doing is necessarily creating a single pod, which might have lots of different people from different bonds. So guess more with Manweller's use case or yours internally where you you might have multiple pods within the same organization. Are they themed on industry or topic or.

Ali Hussain - [16:53 - 17:11]

Yes, they they aren't. And the reason is that if we themed by industry we would we actually talked about it, but we would end up having a lot of overlap in terms of the clients that we could work with. So that would cause potential practical, practical issues for us.

Tom Gatten - [17:11 - 17:14]

How do you set the boundaries between them then?

Ali Hussain - [17:14 - 18:32]

So we actually work on on the even more even simpler principle of a sensible number of people. How many clients can that number of people serve? Well, and then do they have enough variety in that work to keep them? Yes. Learning in depth. I mean, we already specialize in B2B tech, so we have a deep knowledge of the industry so our clients tend to work in. But essentially we are able to say, right, this is a small group of clients that you can focus on that will give you a good variety of work, but also small enough that you get to know them and their worlds and their markets very, very well. So it's not a tighter thing than that. But yeah, that tends to work for us. I think one one other thing I would say as well that's particularly useful in the when you get small kind of teams around client and agency and whoever else partners together is not just thinking about sales and marketing, but also thinking about the product teams as well. So if you can get potentially a maybe pre-sales, but if you get the product teams involved as well, then you unlock an even more exciting range of ideas and perspectives and information that again, you can bring in to solve that problem. So wherever possible, I'd say expand, expand the pod a little bit as long as the numbers don't go overboard.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [18:32 - 19:17]

Yeah, definitely on my side, on in house. Um, we call it. So when we talk about one to few for example, um, Tom we are saying is more vertical based marketing. So we are specializing in per vertical. So in essence, to answer your question, yes, we will have a pod for each industry and whenever we get to talk about an approach, for example, there are other ways that we can think about. So the industry is one, but it's also technographic or based on intent data, and then we can split them that way as well. So we get like really creative in how we we build our programs.

Tom Gatten - [19:17 - 19:52]

And then in theory, the beauty of the pod is that it makes your organization extremely scalable because you can infinitely subdivide your audience and eventually you might have a pod of one, one content marketer, one performance marketer, one sales person, one customer success person, maybe a product person as well. Early to your to your point that are all dedicated to, let's say, you know, cybersecurity companies between 1000 and 5000 employees that have this particular software installed and then they can be incredibly focused and bespoke.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [19:52 - 19:55]

Yeah, absolutely.

Ali Hussain - [19:55 - 20:12]

Yeah, definitely. I think the one the one word of caution I'd add there is just making sure those people have variety and room for growth as well. I mean, to some extent know echoes the way that a business like Amazon with their two pizza rule I think is very smart, very easy to remember concept.

Tom Gatten - [20:12 - 20:13]

Tell us that.

Ali Hussain - [20:13 - 20:57]

So it might be slightly folkloric, but Bezos introduced this two pizza rule where you shouldn't have teams that would need more than two pizzas to feed them, working together on a problem. And it prevents that kind of slightly bureaucratic bloat where there's an awful lot of time being spent passing information around gaining consensus rather than consent. And actually, what's much more scalable, to your point, Thomas, is smaller teams that are modular and focused on specific problems and they're able to move a lot faster as a result. And you can imagine an organization the size of theirs or, you know, any relatively large organization that gives you the opportunity to run a lot more experiments as well with a far, you know, far less risk and resource cost to them.

Tom Gatten - [20:57 - 21:06]

But you're right, each individual, for example, needs to have a route through grads, junior, senior. Yeah.

Ali Hussain - [21:06 - 21:34]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Absolutely. And I find particularly creative teams. Creative teams thrive on variety of input. So. So giving them the opportunity to bring in actively influences from elsewhere, from other industries, from other all walks of life. And the best creatives tend to be naturally curious anyway, but giving them the opportunity and the space to do that I think is a very healthy thing to do.

Joaquin Dominguez - [21:34 - 21:54]

It sounds like the this pod strategy, that the teams are working really unified together. Is it still the information flow a challenge when when they are working in these pods or is it totally.

Tom Gatten - [21:54 - 21:56]

Solved between pods?

Joaquin Dominguez - [21:56 - 22:07]

I don't know. Or within the pod is still are they still working in kind of silos within the pod or is not a problem at all?

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [22:07 - 22:08]

I don't know you.

Ali Hussain - [22:08 - 22:31]

I'll be interested to hear what Manuela says. But I think what pods or these small teams tend to mitigate is needing to say a lot of things to a lot of people. It just makes that amount of information and the the the edges between the nodes a little bit more manageable in terms of numbers.

Joaquin Dominguez - [22:31 - 22:39]

Emmanuella. What's your. Your experience within the pod and then outside of it.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [22:39 - 24:03]

I would say communication and knowledge sharing. I would say that this is something that we constantly need to work on regardless of, you know, how how amazingly knitted teams seem to be. There's always we have to refine and measure and go back and communicate and share information and share the knowledge of the accounts, because this is vital If one of the team members, you know, obviously we have and the quarters and think before we started the recording we were saying like, oh, end of the quarter finishes and everyone is really stressed about. So obviously it goes back to how we're measured because we have different measurements for marketing and sales. You know, for sales, it might be that book a meeting pipeline revenue, but for the marketers conversions click through rate attribution and so on. So think in terms of a challenge. I do find that it's still like a constant. We need to constantly be better at communication and knowledge sharing about that particular account in order to win it and keeping that lines of communication really fast, pivot quickly within the whole campaign. Even if we're talking about a copy ad or a visual or any information from sales is is vital. So, yeah, I would say so.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [24:03 - 24:04]

Ali Hussain - [24:04 - 25:35]

That point around incentives obviously is so, so crucial. That I think is probably probably something we should address. Um, it's probably the, you know, if I were to, to put some money on the number one cause of sales and marketing misalignment, it would probably be incentives and a lack of alignment of incentives. I was speaking to the CMO of a large consultancy business the other night, and she said that the way that she tends to get around this is by thinking of leading and leading kind of indicator metrics and then the kind of slightly lagging metrics and sales metrics tend to be the lagging metrics revenue, you know, pipeline closed, sometimes pipeline generated steps a little further, further upfront. Um, but then if marketers are obsessed with sorry, a focused only on the leading metrics of, for instance, engagement metrics and the two things aren't joined up and you're not showing how the two things are joined up, then it's very easy to to focus simply on the metric. That might not necessarily be the most meaningful, but is the one on which you're targeted. So yeah, there are many things you could do to increase engagement that might not necessarily have any impact on revenue or profit and the bigger metrics you're ultimately aiming towards. So connecting those incentives, even if you can't align them exactly on the same incentives, connecting the incentives is absolutely crucial.

Tom Gatten - [25:35 - 25:51]

Is there is there a good example of how to get that right? Because. And so people want instant feedback, don't they? They want their compensation to be tied to things that they're doing right now. So you can't just say to a marketer, okay, I'm only going to compensate you on realized revenue.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [25:51 - 25:52]

In.

Ali Hussain - [25:52 - 26:52]

Two years time or five years time for actions that you're taking today. Yes. Yeah, of course. And I think, again, that that framework of leading and lagging is what can help. So to show that there is a connection between the two and to understand that connection a little bit better certainly helps in ABM in particular. We we use a four R's is a very useful way to cover a range of metrics that speak to both marketing and sales and product. So those are metrics around reputation, metrics around relationships and a number of relationships held in the account, metrics around revenue, obviously. And then also the fourth R, which not everyone uses, but we think is very important is the idea of retention as well. So particularly over the past couple of years as customer lifecycle marketing has become more important, growing your existing customers has become more important. That idea of retention, that dollar retention has become a really interesting, important metric for many of our clients to.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [26:52 - 26:57]

Yeah.

Joaquin Dominguez - [26:57 - 27:29]

I want to come back to to one point before that, we were discussing about the flow of information within the teams. And because also I'm bringing back the theory of communities of practices is that in communities of practices the, the tacit knowledge. Is I don't know if you came across the concept of tacit knowledge, but it's the knowledge that you can't explain to to the rest of the organization how it's working within your pod, for example.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [27:29 - 27:31]

Okay.

Joaquin Dominguez - [27:31 - 27:38]

You just do the things because you know how to do it. You know how to do it with your with your team. But when you want to explain it, when it.

Tom Gatten - [27:38 - 27:38]

Works, when the.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [27:38 - 27:39]

When it works.

Tom Gatten - [27:39 - 27:40]

Exactly with each other and.

Joaquin Dominguez - [27:40 - 28:18]

But but usually works and tacit knowledge has a very important part in in innovation within the organizations. But the problem is how you transmit that knowledge to the rest of the organization. I don't know if you have tips, for example, um, going on, on, on trips like visiting, I don't know, factories or going to clients with different parts, working together or writing a case study. Do you have any, any kind of examples regarding that?

Tom Gatten - [28:18 - 28:30]

So in theory it should it should work in mean. It's almost reminds me of the dreaded matrix organization thing, but in theory the marketing people from every pot should get together and share knowledge that way.

Ali Hussain - [28:30 - 30:04]

Yeah, absolutely. I think going back again just to the fundamentals of it. If so, an interesting situation recently where a few people came to me and said, you know, it feels like we're not quite working as well as we should do with this other group of people. And it's because they were just they're relatively new and they're just settling in and they hadn't established those kind of daily cadences that start to build relationships. And that's one of the other reasons I didn't touch on it earlier, but that I'm particularly interested in the idea of these smaller, more relatable sized teams is now with people working in, you know, whether it's working from home or working, you know, across different regions, it's harder to build those incidental moments into your day and into your relationships. And so actually being much more intentional about that is very, very important. I'm lucky enough that I do get to go into the office, you know, maybe once or twice a week and it's it's still so obvious to me that the conversations and the incidental moments I have in the office can't really be recreated virtually. But what you do to mitigate that is say, okay, well, let's just be a bit more focused and let's say, right, you do need to work more intentionally with a smaller group of people to start building those relationships and don't assume that it can happen so much, you know, at the same velocity as it did previously when everyone was in the office and picking up on all that other information that you get from just being around at the same space as other people. You know, body language is a huge part of it. Over conversations is another big part of it.

Tom Gatten - [30:04 - 30:14]

And in that book made a really massive thing about co-location. You have a single desk for a single pod. Yeah, but of course, that's no longer possible.

Ali Hussain - [30:14 - 30:21]

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things, for example, we introduced when we went into the first lockdown a few years ago.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [30:21 - 30:22]

What?

Ali Hussain - [30:22 - 31:15]

Daily stand up. Daily stand up meetings. The idea is very simple. When you when you logged on in the morning, you have a bit of time to go through the things and to get your head in order. But then you had a small chat and it could be ten, 15 minutes with the other people in your pod. And that became people's, you know, one of people's favourite parts of the day. And, you know, their work life was and sometimes those chats were about work. And a lot of the times it was just a social conversation for 5 or 10 minutes just to feel like human beings talking to other human beings again, because you didn't get so much of that in the rest of your day. If you were working by yourself in a desk or in front of a screen or going from one meeting to the next without time to breathe in between. So yeah, those those quite simple mechanical things can be so important in trying to not recreate but reform some of those relationships we naturally crave.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [31:15 - 31:58]

To also build on on what Ali said. Um, I would also say sales and marketing enablement sessions. So sessions where you will get on rotation to talk about projects like successes or failures, just like that, open communication and that human communication and really make the time to listen. Yeah. And I think that's Covid. Thought, you know, this was one thing that came out of it that. Yes, we started to to see that we're remote. But now we have to even if we're remote, we have to still have that human interaction and communication.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [31:58 - 31:59]

Yes.

Joaquin Dominguez - [31:59 - 32:19]

And we have been talking a lot about within the team, but also outside of the organization, like understanding your client's problem, of course, is that being problem aware, especially on ABM, for example? Emmanuel, we talk about this is so important, right?

Emanuela Mafteiu - [32:19 - 33:26]

Yes, absolutely. And taking the time. So most most of the time you have like, you know, um, solution aware and all of that, really lovely models, but you really have to go back to the problem aware and make that time to explain different you know how you do things within your business be that business the human approach. So business to approach nowadays is so needed. And I think Ali talked about at the beginning about that empathy. So marketing really needs to to do this, to show this empathy and to really understand our customers and be, you know, problem aware, start with a problem like outcome focus. And you definitely get that empathy across. And obviously the campaigns are better and click through rates and all of the lovely measurements that we are we have. So I think it really impacts when you just go down to that human approach and open communication about our customer's problems. So that's really, really important.

Joaquin Dominguez - [33:26 - 33:35]

And then how do you bring in your case, Emanuela? KPIs and metrics that align sales and marketing in your company.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [33:35 - 34:47]

So this is what we've done originally with sales. So we had like a small pilot project campaign, and it's very it's useful to start small. And we, we had an open conversation and said, okay, what are the ideals? So we've built this marketing and sales dashboard within the Salesforce platform. And we said, okay, what what is really important, important is revenue. Okay, let's add it to the list. What else? Booking a meeting. Okay, this one's important. Added to the list conversion rate. Okay. This is really important how the accounts move down the funnel. And and as I said, like that open communication at the beginning and just talking about how we see the process from a sales perspective, from a marketing perspective, and we've built this together and like both parties believe in it now and this is how we're measured. And as I said, it wasn't an easy process because everyone was like, Yes, but this is so important for me. And then marketing. Well, yes, but this is important as well. So we kind of found common ground in the end. Joaquin Dominguez - [34:47 - 35:18]

All right, let's move on. Let's talk about strategies to make the creative aspects of marketing more relatable and impactful for sales, ultimately benefiting the alignment between the two departments. So how marketing teams can articulate the value of creative campaigns. And so how do you justify the creative efforts internally? Do you have any examples on that?

Ali Hussain - [35:18 - 37:10]

Item I'd be tempted to. To start? Well, in a couple of ways. There is. A body of evidence. All of which defines creativity in slightly different ways and slightly odd and debatably useful ways. But there's a lot of theory around the power of creativity. I don't think sales teams tend to care a great deal about it. And frankly, I think the evidence is not as strong as it could or should be. But what you can do I think a lot of. Creative work is produced very, very separately from sales, and that can be a real problem. And again, taking it away from kind of what's marketing sales, but actually just something more, more fundamental. People tend to find it hard to buy into ideas when they haven't been involved in their creation. So bringing salespeople into the conversations earlier can actually can help a great deal. And again, going back to ABM. We find that actually when you work with sales teams and you listen to them first and you understand what they're thinking about and account. And then after you've done that, then you start to think about creative ideas and taking stories into that account. Sales teams tend to love it. They get incredibly excited. And actually, frankly, they're almost, you know, the idea of asking about the value of it is almost the last thing on their minds, which sounds really counterintuitive with the stereotype we have in our heads of kind of hard nosed, revenue focused, money driven salespeople. But actually they get as excited about great creativity as anybody else. So I think the way in which you can develop your creative makes a big difference to how it's received. And then on the back end, obviously. I'm starting to measure the effectiveness of the campaign is very hard to separate the creative output and measure that separately from everything else. Ali Hussain - [37:10 - 37:35]

Especially in something like where you tend to have small sample sets and AB testing isn't particularly easy. But nonetheless, if you can then prove and they start to see the return on the campaign in terms of new new opportunities, larger deal sizes, accelerated pipeline, then that obviously tends to tend to make them pretty happy as well. But yeah, I think generally sales teams don't need to be convinced of the value of creative. You just need to find a way to get them excited about it.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [37:35 - 37:38]

Oh, a lovely.

Joaquin Dominguez - [37:38 - 37:58]

Reflection, I think. Emmanuel. You also mentioned something about this before, like putting the client at the center and learning from sales teams to inform marketing, basically not to inform, but to nurture marketing about ideas and to be creative at the end and building that human connection.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [37:58 - 38:55]

Absolutely. Like enabling marketing to come up those lovely storytelling, really good creatives. But look, this is where I think the marketeer needs to be good at both creativity and data because I think a good marketeer has to use both sides of the brain left and right. Um, just because firstly, you need to understand the insights derived from the data, you know, such as customer preferences and buying behaviours and market trends and all sorts of that, you know, lovely even from the lovely conversations that sales have with our prospects, for instance. But just putting that together, I think as a marketeer you need to have both. So first of all, bridging the data creative divide, you kind of that marketing person has to have both. This is what.

Tom Gatten - [38:55 - 39:16]

Makes a really attractive set of skills, isn't it? We when we're working with a brand agency to redesign the brand of sax, and I've given them this concept of of precision punk as the aesthetic, it's exactly that kind of trying to appeal to people who are really driven by both, you know, bringing together creativity and value.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [39:16 - 40:21]

So I think this is a very useful way in with your sales department, especially that we talked earlier in our conversation today that we are wired differently, sales and marketing and think using those data points to build in within your story when you're showing them the creatives or the logic of your campaign as as Ali said, they get excited. They just buy in and just, yeah, support you along the way and they're really curious to see what results that will bring. And even with AB test, I would say from my experience, they're very willing to do AB tests on different colors or different perspective or different questions that we add in the copy. So they're very, very much bought in in this whole process and this is what makes it exciting for us, you know, using the data creative and we craft our messages to resonate with the target audience, like building those effective and compelling stories. And this drives yeah, this, this drives more account engagement, for example.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [40:21 - 40:23]

The other day.

Joaquin Dominguez - [40:23 - 40:43]

What a post on LinkedIn saying what is marketing not about? And it was Emily in Paris. You know, just having a clever idea, having a having a clever idea without data that's not marketing, That's I don't know what it is, but I think that comes to your point.

Tom Gatten - [40:43 - 41:03]

Emmanuella Well, you know, for the outside world, it should it should look like that in a perfect world to the audience, they're like, Oh, these guys are, you know, jetting off around the world doing fancy photo shoots. And it's so cool. And look, they're with celebrities and whatever, but hopefully that's not actually how the decisions have been made in the background.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [41:03 - 41:04]

Yeah.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [41:04 - 41:07]

Absolutely. Yeah.

Ali Hussain - [41:07 - 41:46]

There is. Um, there is a danger when you enter a conversation like this as well, you start to have a very narrow definition of marketing and you kind of skip past the segmentation, the targeting part, you kind of put products and, and placement and price to one side and you go, No, no, it's all about the markhams and the ad that you see. And I think once you start talking with that frame around it. You on slightly flimsier ground trying to prove your value to the rest of the organization. And then you kind of maybe start tying yourself in knots about the value of of creativity as being something separate from the rest of marketing and those kind of foundational things of segmentation and targeting and positioning.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [41:46 - 42:08]

I also think that usually marketing department is a bit misunderstood because we are seen to be, Oh, you're those bubbly, creative people that have to come up with creative ideas. But the reality is different, as we discussed. I think that's a misconception there as well.

Ali Hussain - [42:08 - 42:59]

Absolutely. And it's a very hard thing to you know, when people talk about race, they tend to focus on the ROI of a campaign. And there are more interesting, more sophisticated models. Now, whether that's multi-touch attribution or market mix modeling that can start to show the value of certain marketing activities. But it's also there's a huge amount of value. I believe that's kind of the tip of the iceberg stuff, and there's actually a huge amount of value beneath that around market orientation and segmentation and targeting and positioning. And that's the stuff that's very hard to measure the value of. You don't really have the counterfactual to say, Oh, it would have been different if we had targeted this completely different audiences or segmented the market in a completely different way and come up with an entirely different product. So I think that the huge value that goes unrecognized in marketing is that foundational strategy work Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [42:59 - 42:59]

Tom Gatten - [42:59 - 44:10]

I was. I was interested in saying I think perhaps one of the problems that he's referring to is as a result of just the average tenure of someone's job at a company. You know, if people are working in a marketing job for three years, then you really can't invest more than incrementally. If you were working for I'm not sure this is the certainly not the answer. But if in a world in which marketers were in the same job for like ten years never happened, but you know what I mean, then people would be much more willing to invest in influencing an audience over the course of like a company's life thinking in terms of company life cycles rather than just job life cycles or 2 or 3 year or campaign life cycles. And it's not that's not going to happen. But maybe there are other ways to think about like you were talking about lacking the kind of innovation curve. That's a good way to think about. Okay. Well, for the next two years, all I'm going to be doing is speaking to early adopters, and that's fine. But then we might start doing other things and that's one model.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [44:10 - 44:50]

And also just to introduce Tom, another thought is like most when we're talking about the ten year, most people will try and go vertically when they go through a, you know, like a different role within the same company and so on for the past like ten years, for example. But when you're trying to to approach the job itself horizontally and be exposed to multiple roles, you know, maybe you're doing brand or you're doing demand generation, you're getting all that knowledge that you can bring to your next role. It's just not.

Tom Gatten - [44:50 - 44:51]

Paid as well.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [44:51 - 44:56]

Exactly. Yeah. But it's it's just getting that balance right. Joaquin Dominguez - [44:56 - 45:45]

And and how do you see B2B marketing within the organization? Is is always marketing responsible for the for the final results of the of of a product or a brand. For example, I come from a B2C background and we did a huge transfer transfers. Transfers transformation within the the company that I used to work for a very big winery. And after that transformation with BCG was marketing the brand owners, the ones that were in charge of the of the results for the brands, not the market owners or the commercial or sales teams. We were the ones that were presenting.

Tom Gatten - [45:45 - 45:51]

Much more common in B2C. The results brands marketing team is much more strategically central.

Joaquin Dominguez - [45:51 - 46:05]

Yeah, in B2B, I don't know how are you structured? And Emanuela, you structure similar or are the commercial or sales teams the ones that are responsible for for the final?

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [46:05 - 46:07]

The results of the.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [46:07 - 47:05]

I would say we're equally responsible. So let's think about the main measure. Let's think about revenue, for example. I think we're equally responsible. And the way if you think about it as in the past, the model and it's very difficult to explain it in the podcast, but if you if you if you know the model at the base of your pyramid, let's imagine a pyramid at the base, you'll have the marketing department. And then on top of that continues with the sales. So this is how the old model worked. But now think of it as a main triangle where it's kind of half in the middle. So you have marketing and sales alongside. So this is more how we are working and and this kind of landscape. So we're as responsible. It's not about, oh, top of the funnel marketing is responsible middle and bottom of the funnel just sales. So no absolutely we share the responsibility.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [47:05 - 47:06]

Oh, this.

Joaquin Dominguez - [47:06 - 47:10]

Is something similar with with your clients, Ali.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [47:10 - 47:10]

Ali Hussain - [47:10 - 47:44]

Yeah, I absolutely agree with what I've said. I think it goes back to the the point you made near the beginning around the changing buyer journey. Um, the amount of time that buyers want to spend self-serving information, which ultimately is, is provided by marketing in most times rather than sales. And so that is an increasing trend. And, and as a result, as Emanuela said, that overlap between what marketing is responsible for and what sales is responsible for is is only going to grow as we go forward.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [47:44 - 47:46]

Well.

Joaquin Dominguez - [47:46 - 48:13]

Excellent strategies and on alignment and creativity and data driven goals. Our final segment today looks on the ongoing education and training and how that can play a role in keeping this department aligned. So how do you see education in in the alignment of these two departments? Education and training in.

Emanuela Mafteiu - [48:13 - 49:51]

I would say a key role plays the marketing and sales enablement sessions. I do feel that these are very important and key sessions. As said when on rotation, we go and talk about our learning, what we've learned and the success and even the failure sometimes. So that open communication is very, very important and this is part of the education that we have to continuously support. But ultimately, I would say in terms of monthly reviews, that's an education piece or on the analytics, we need to go back to the data again and again to see like, okay, are we measured correctly? How have we done this important aspect of looking at the data for this particular account? How have we moved them from one journey to another and so on? Are they showing intent? And all of all of those program execution is another thing. And obviously the recommended edits within that campaign in any campaign, not just ABM, but I would say an education about refinement and particularly ABM journey, I can say that it's never static. It's always evolving. And we need to pivot quickly. So it's all about that test measure, refine strategic model and think that is very key in keeping our departments aligned and on the same page.

Ali Hussain - [49:51 - 50:42]

Yeah, I'd agree with everything Emanuela said. And the principle is sound. Often sales in terms of ongoing education as well. Two things. If you can only be reporting metrics and reporting on metrics that ultimately sales are interested in and showing the impact you're having on them, you know, time and time again, that does have to take place over over an ongoing period of time. Then that's obviously very powerful and very compelling for them. And the second thing is actually, you know, sales organizations tend to have a relatively high degree of churn. So it isn't a simple case of being able to say something once and oh, yes, now our sales department now has that and gets it. It's just not a very practical level. People are like to move in and out of that department relatively frequently. So once said again. And.

Joaquin Dominguez: 4 - [50:42 - 50:46]

Yeah. You're interesting. All right.

Joaquin Dominguez - [50:46 - 50:51]

We are coming to an end. Thank you so much for your collaboration today.