Randy Littleson: 0:00

Because let's face it, any sales situation that you're going to be in? They don't go in a straight line anymore. Right? I think if you look at one of the biggest things that changed about b2b selling over the last several years is the degree of complexity and lack of linearity to the process is off the charts now, right? Issue number two is goal misalignment. Right. If marketing talks about MQL, tell them to shut up. Right? I mean, that's just not where we should be today.

Daniel Bartels: 0:32

Welcome to growth pulse b2b sales podcast, we take a deep dive in the world of business to business sales, and how businesses can get the most out of their investment in sales people sales systems and processes, the lifeblood of any thriving organisation. Join us as we explore a range of topics as well as speak to some of the industry's thought leaders, vendors success stories. People have just won and failed on their journey in business and sales. Before we get started, please do us a huge favour and click subscribe follow alike wherever you're watching or listening to us. Also, please drop us a comment when you subscribe. We'd love to get to know our audience. And today's show, we're talking to Randy Littleson. He's a world renowned marketing expert. over 30 years in the game. He's been either the VP of marketing or CMO for some amazing innovative companies, such as nice inContact, conga, fluxea and Spyglass. Simon and I are talking to Randy about how sales and marketing can work better together. Great salespeople always know how to get the best out of marketing to build a healthy pipeline. So let's jump in. Well, welcome everybody to this latest edition of the growth pulse podcast. Simon Randy, welcome and good day.

Simon Peterson: 1:46

Thanks, Dan. Thanks Dan.

Daniel Bartels: 1:49

Randy, so excited to have you on the podcast. You know, you and I've worked together before. And I want to really give a bit of a background to yourself to our listeners. How did you get to being CMO of some phenomenal tech companies? What was the journey?

Randy Littleson: 2:06

Yep. Thanks, Dan. Thanks, Simon. Very glad to be with you. So believe it or not, I got my degree actually out of university in computer science. So I've been in software, literally my entire career. Had a stint I was actually as a sales engineer, started off in sales engineering role moved into product management, then that became that was usually in marketing. And some of the smaller companies I was with broke out as I got into bigger companies. Along the way, I have actually run r&d and professional services for a short stint. I've worked in public companies, private companies, both VC and private equity backed companies that range from about 30 million all the way up to a multi billion dollar company of which I was the CMO of a division public company nice. A division that grew from about 260 million to about 800 million in the five years that I was there. So sort of sort of been in a variety of different companies, different spaces as well, from call centre technology to sell into it organisations actually worked for a CRM company back years ago. So sort of touch different spaces as well.

Daniel Bartels: 3:19

What do you think is the difference between the like the the marketing messages of all those different organisations? Is the the messaging and the methodology different? Or are they pretty similar?

Randy Littleson: 3:29

I think it's more similar than different, right? At the end of the day. I think the first thing that companies need to do is to identify how you're different. And I learned this many years ago, I worked for a company called Flexera Software at the time, and we were trying to sort of create this new space that ultimately got called Software licence optimization. So think about we worked with Procter and Gamble back years ago, for example, you think about Procter and Gamble, they are experts at procuring things right? They're really, really, really good at it. And software is a tricky beast, though, right? Because you can be really good at procuring software. But once you get it into your organisation, maybe you bought an application about 10,000 seats or whatever, it's really hard to control. Am I using all of it and getting my full value? Am I using more than I'm supposed to. And so this space called Software licence optimization, we actually helped solve a problem for Procter and Gamble, we saved them $30 million in six months, helping them identify what software they had. And you know how to control that spend, how to get back, how to repurpose, and so on. At the time, there was a space called IT Asset Management. And so one of the big things that we had to do in differentiation was to say that software is very unique and different. It's got a whole set of new problems, and it can't just be a checkmark in an IT Asset Management System. You need a dedicated specific purpose built solution around software. That was many, many years ago, but I think one of the lessons that comes out of that out is, as any company, you've got to be different first to get yourself against the right competitors. If we were positioned as a checkmark feature in that IT Asset Management, we were competing against IBM, Tivoli, HP, UNICEF, I mean, big, big behemoths that were entrenched in some of the biggest accounts, and we would have been dead on arrival. So differentiate first. And then obviously, once you get against the right competitors, you've got to be better. Right? You got to be better against the right competitors, you got to prove that out. So I think the message and all of that is, is how do you clarify that differentiation? And how do you really identify which space that you're in? How do you claim differentiation to get put into that space? And then you've got to have clarity of positioning of how you're better than any of the competitors and solving that problem that that you've identified and aligned to? And that has been pretty consistent across everywhere, I have been.

Daniel Bartels: 5:55

Yeah, I mean, I think from from a sales lens, it's an interesting piece, because that's the piece that we kind of always focus into, which is, you've got a problem. And I can solve it in a different way than you've thought about doing it before, because you're trying to avoid being commoditized. It's just another solution and ended up in a race to the bottom. But it's interesting hearing you talk about how that that thought process becomes really core to what you do from a marketing messaging perspective. At a holistic level so often as a salesperson, I think that's one of the things we wanted to talk about today, which is really the the the similarities and the differences between how marketers and salespeople approach the same problem, which is the end of the day is finding more customers and selling more stuff.

Simon Peterson: 6:43

Yep. Thank you. As a marketer, you spend a lot of time in rooms discussing your individual messaging, why you different exactly what you just described, I think, one of the challenges from a, I guess, a sales team's perspective is we look at you guys in marketing, and you've really smart and come up with creative ideas. And then I've somehow got to take those creative ideas out into the marketplace and make sense of them at the coalface. Do you find the best sellers? Pick up on that really quickly? Do they take the message verbatim? Do they put their own spin on it? What's your advice to sellers? Now, I guess, once marketers have come up with the wonderful differentiation, what does the seller do with it?

Randy Littleson: 7:30

Yeah, I think there's a couple of things to that, right. First and foremost, I think it is really, really important that you have a common positioning and message that gets communicated everywhere, right, is really important. Because if you dilute that message out, if a CEO goes speaks at a conference and says one thing slightly different than a marketing person speaking at a different conference, versus a salesperson, now all of a sudden, you've got a diluted message, and there's no consistency, right? You're not, you're not getting the leverage out in the marketplace to be consistent. Think about your partners if you've told them slightly different than that. So I think getting that common message down is absolutely essential. Exactly how you bring that to life and communicate it. I think there's room for personalization there, right? The stories that you tell the way that you communicate that message in a way that you're comfortable with, I think is really, really important, right? Because I don't want to give Dan stories that don't resonate with him that he can't be comfortable communicating and that so I think stories is a great way to one articulate your message but also is a way to make it comfortable for you. But the same message, right, so you've got the same message. I think the other challenge that I've seen over the years that's really, really true is if you think about most software companies, what do we enable the sales team on most of the time, its features and by definition that creates a problem in that people want to dive to the hard deck and start talking features. And we were actually talking before we got on this right is that one of the things you really want to do is to position to people that look the world is changing. And there's a profound change happening that if you don't act to your they're gonna win or you're gonna lose relative to that change. So a digital transformation is a great theme, for example, customer experience space that I spent five years in rise a great theme, right? The importance of customer experience right now cannot be understated. And you either adopt that mindset in your organisation and and shift your paradigm around that change in the marketplace or else you get creamed. under percent. That's not a feature function thing to start with. That's a paradigm shift in the market. Right? And so, that level of messaging and getting that conveyed and then ultimately, you do need to show how you're the ones that can help do it but you got to lead with that to get people But that does not come easy to all salespeople because and the company reinforces against that, because we keep training on features all the time. So I think there's a place for both of those, right, you've got to get that higher level message that higher level differentiation and what makes you unique in the marketplace. And then there's a time for features and capabilities, which is a part of your solution that you actually deliver that, but you don't lead with that. Right, you lead with that higher level story. And then you get down to that. And I think we as organisations often fail, because we constantly just keep hitting on the feature messages. And don't tie it back to that overall, and don't educate and enable people on how to tie those two together, give them stories that help them get comfortable with how they can articulate the message in a way that resonates for them. You put those together, and I think you can make.

Simon Peterson: 10:53

I was gonna say, Dan, I'm going to bring up one of your favourite topics here. Because I think, you know, Randy, your as a CMO, your job is to help facilitate the message within the organisation. So you've got consistency across regions, across geographies, roles, as you say, partners need to know, one of the things I see global corporate marketing teams come out with on a relatively frequent basis is the concept of the pitch deck. And this is a global set of slides that talks to what we do, why are we different, etc. And I know, I'm going to ask this question of Dan. I mean, this is your favourite thing in the world, right? When you're sitting there with a sales team, you're 2030 Guys and girls sitting there weren't ready to go and smash the numbers for a year and corporate comes out with a pitch deck that, you know, in our experience is probably fairly culturally aligned to North America. You've also got 80 slides in there that you're supposed to go deliver superbly. Typically, you'll have a chief revenue officer that wants everybody certified. Don't tell me about your your love of the corporate pitch deck.

Daniel Bartels: 12:05

Yeah, I think this is a really, I'd love your opinion on this as well, Randy, like, I think it's a really interesting problem that you have in any size organisation. And you know, the the topic of this this conversation, we've had a sales and marketing work together, when you put kind of the sub parts of the business into that conversation as well. Obviously, I've got an operations team, I've got a delivery team, from selling boxes, and I've got a distribution team here. And I understand that it's different product is going to different types of retailers or wholesalers or then I've got a product marketing team and I've got a development, all of these people want their part to their messaging in what we're talking about. At the end of the day, you take these decks that become blown or these messaging pieces have become blown out over a period of time. And really the job of it I've always expensive job of a salesperson is to disseminate the information, how do you take all this messaging and simplify it right down to the point where a singular customer can understand in their own context? What can you do for me, that makes my life business customers life, whatever it is better tomorrow than what it is today. And that super simple thought process of what will be better tomorrow from what it is today. So often doesn't come out of these. I mean mentioned a moment ago, Randy, these feature function developments have stuck that we built and you know, and, and the bit that always jumps me out and punches me in the nose saying, Hey, listen, what I really want to know, is the five customers that did something amazing last year, just tell me that tell me how a customer actually made these things

Randy Littleson: 13:47

live.

Daniel Bartels: 13:49

Because I know for especially for all the listeners that are in the APAC region, our biggest challenges, we don't have enough people but we've only got 26 million people in Australia. And that's like half of California. So it's less than half of California right? So the ability to have these companies are doing just the frequency of things overseas is so much more. And you know my my biggest thing and you're probably cringing hearing me say this, Randy but take these decks and be willing to kind of tear them up, but tear them up and put them back together again, in terms of what it is What is it you can go and do and what you what can you actually deliver with the time and effort you've got available? I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on that?

Randy Littleson: 14:28

Well, you guys probably won't be surprised. I'm a believer in a pitch deck. However, I think what Simon articulated is what goes wrong with them a lot of times he's absolutely right. I've seen that be the case, right where you know, you've got 40 slides and you expect people to memorise 40 slides. That's crazy, right? To me a good pitch deck is a dozen ish slides right? Somewhere in that area right it's real short and sweet. It's it's how do I get that standardised message out to lay a foundation because what Let's face it, any sales situation that you're going to be in, they don't go in a straight line anymore. Right? I think if you look at one of the biggest things that changed about b2b selling over the last several years is the degree of complexity and lack of linearity to the process is off the charts now, right? I mean, we've all seen the statistics of the amount of research that's done before they even engage with us somewhere around 70%, or something like that, right? We know that there's a lot of buyer personas that get involved. I saw research recently, right, if you've got less than a $50,000, average deal size, you get about seven people in your buying committee, from 50 to 250. It's about 10 people in your buying committee and above 250, in deal size, it's like 19 people in your buying committee. So that's a lot of different personas and constituents that you've got to be able to reach right and be able to speak to them and address their concerns in that the buying process is very complex, I do think there's a role for a very concise deck that lays the foundation of what your core positioning and differentiation is knowing full well that from that point on, it could fork in a million different directions. And there's no way to have a standard deck for that. And even in this condensed pitch deck that I'm talking about the dozen ish slides, there's probably there should be some customer slides in there, that should be 100% module so that you can pick from a library that based on my Geo, maybe based on the vertical, I mean, I'm going to pick relevant stories, I'm not going to be in a and Zed and pick stories that are only from the UK, right or from the US or whatever, I'm going to pick local stories, which again, if you're getting started is harder to do, but that those are just scale challenges in that right. So I do think it's important that you have the ability to localise it in that context, I do think it's important that you have that standard foundational capturing that core differentiation message, what's the major trend in the market that we can help you with? What is our unique view on that and the capabilities that we can bring, excuse me, and then, you know, some validation that we can actually do that, if you can lay that foundation consistently in the various meetings that you have, and then for coffee, and start addressing the specifics of the circumstance and that, I think there's value in that, but it's not a 80 slide deck 40 slide deck that you're expecting people to memorise, and everything, I think you can get into bigger decks that are module that you can pull from so that reps don't have to create on their own. But that's a modular sort of reference deck. To me that's different than sort of this initial pitch deck. Yep. Yeah.

Daniel Bartels: 17:52

So going back to the core to this question, then, which is how to sales and marketing work better together? In that instance, because, again, we've all seen it, whether it's a pitch deck, whether it's, you know, a release deck, or whatever, you know, people get into this problem of there's too much information there. What in your experience has been kind of the behaviours that you get on either side of the equation? The divisional leaders or the or the marketing know, the sales and marketing people at the ground level, actually, but put in place to get a get the best outcome, like how do they win?

Randy Littleson: 18:30

Marketing work, one of the things

Daniel Bartels: 18:31

you've seen that had the biggest impact. So

Randy Littleson: 18:37

I actually work together to do

Daniel Bartels: 18:42

that a couple of times I've seen and

Randy Littleson: 18:45

I think there's a couple of things where things can go wrong, right? Number one is, if you look at sales and marketing, one of the biggest points of friction is the time horizon to horizon difference. If you think about a sales role, the time horizon, justifiably and understandably, is very short term, you're worried about this month or this quarter, and how you're going to get deals across. And that should be your priority. That's what you get paid on. That's what the company needs, that that is the priority, that has a tendency to really focus the energy, right, very short term. We think about marketing. On the other hand, while we do want marketing, helping and supporting that as well marketing's time horizon is much longer in the general sense, right? Marketing is trying to really, really think about what we're trying to do is we're trying to condition the market to be predisposed to buy our stuff, right? You're trying to identify those people that are in market, you're trying to build awareness with them, and you're trying to, you know, move them along in the process, in our direction in that, that tends to be building awareness, things like that. Those are longer term propositions. That tends to be the source of a lot of frustration. And so I think, one the more that you like any problem, right, the more that you're cognizant and aware of that the more that you can be in tune with that. And oh, okay, I get it. I think it's incumbent upon marketing to do a better job of educating as well. Right? There are things that we do thought leadership, analyst relations, press relations, you know, speaking opportunities, awareness oriented things that are more on the awareness spectrum that may not have that short term dividend. But I think we can all agree that the more times we walk into an account and they know who they are, or that who we are, there's awareness that we've built over a period of time and that we're, that's going to be good for us, right. But too often, it's like everything that we do in marketing is expected to have that short term outcome. And I don't think we always do a good job of educating that. Look, this is actually planting seeds for the future. And here's the reason why that's important. Right? So that's issue number one. I think Issue number two is gold misalignment. Right? If marketing talks about MQLs, tell them to shut up. Right? I mean, that's just not where we should be today. Right? I'll give you an example. When I joined in contact, that became nice in context, we got acquired by nice. I did a sort of listening tour, and my first several weeks there, and I met with lots of people in sales, sales, leadership, individual reps, everything. And I heard a couple of things, which is, hey, look, your predecessor did a really nice job on building the overall brand and everything else. No knock on her, she did a good job. But there wasn't enough focus on the things that mattered to us. Pipeline bookings, revenue, right. And even when you guys did talk about those things, you weren't even using our numbers. That's gonna lead to a lot of problems. Right. So I literally before the end of my first quarter, recalibrated all of the discretionary goals for marketing that they got paid on around two metrics. It was around pipelining bookings, the exact same metrics, the tails was finite, unbelievable what that did. So now when we're in meetings, we're having dialogue, and we're discussing all of a sudden, we're talking about water bowls this quarter to drive pipeline and get bookings. Oh, that's the exact right. Right. So that does a lot to really make a difference, right, goalline is the second thing. And then I think the third thing is, there's got to be mutual respect on both sides to the job that's being done, combined with a willingness to collaborate, right? Because if you automatically let's go back to the pitch deck that we were talking about, right? If marketing creates a pitch deck with no involvement from sales, it probably isn't going to go very well. Right. So you've got to have a working team that is cross functional in nature, right? Sales needs to respect the value and the role that marketing is playing in this and that they own certain things and marketing needs to do from sale. But there's good ideas to come from both directions, right. And so I think if you focus on those three things, time horizon, awareness of it, education around it, discussion around it, that helps a lot. goal alignment is really, really important. And then the third thing is, you've got to collaborate. And that starts with leadership, right? It's incumbent upon all of us to roll up our sleeves, be willing to have that dialogue, be willing to get people involved. I think those three things I would put front and centre as the keys, I've seen it work very, very well. And those things tend to be the foundation of being able to make that work.

Simon Peterson: 23:23

Yeah, look, I completely agree. I can't tell you how many frustrating conversations I've had around goal misalignment, I'll be sitting in a meeting, and I've got a dashboard with marketing telling me how wonderful the outcomes are. And then we get into a, you know, an argument about the definition of an MQL. And when it's an SQL I think, you know, that's, you know, that's, that's one side of it, I think it's quite right as well that I think salespeople do need to respect the work of marketers more, I think salespeople sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that the most important person on the planet, they are an important part of the machine. But I think you need as a salesperson to respect and work with the people out there that are creating the awareness, filling the top of the funnel is the lifeblood. And I think if you actually invest some time to understand what marketing is trying to do as a seller, you'll get a better outcome.

Randy Littleson: 24:22

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And I've seen over the years, some phenomenal partnerships, and that I'll tell you one of the things I've got a coach, you know, my marketing teams on all the time. And this will sound at the initial negative and it's not intended to be at all but I've got to coach some people in marketing sometimes to say, you don't work for sales, you work with sales. Yeah, we each have a role. We have shared and aligned goals. We each play a different part of doing that. We need to orchestrate those together and work towards those common goals. But we work together because you know, a lot of salespeople have very strong personalities and strong opinions. everything and then marketing people can immediately start to then question themselves and not play their role. And we need them equally playing a role in doing what they're good at, combining that with everything that sales is good at, you put those two together, you're gonna get a much, much better outcome. it skews one way too far, if that's not the best outcome that a company can get. So it does take leadership coaching and everybody playing their part, that's the way you're going to get the best outcome.

Daniel Bartels: 25:29

Yeah, I think I think it's an interesting piece, Randy sales. And we've said this a few times on the podcast so far, where it's a unique game where you lose so much more than you win. And there's always a very few other paths, you know, career paths you can take or past times, if you're, if you're in a football team, or a baseball team, where were you lost 70% of the time, you'd quit and do something else, right? You have to be really passionate about the game. But in sales like that, that's a good outcome. And so if you think about the behaviours then of a marketing person, they might be losing on a regular basis, ie, you know, eyeballs are seeing the ads or seeing the activities, but not reacting to them, but they don't experience it. They don't actually and, and genuinely see halfway through a sales halfway through a, they're just seeing the statistics, they're not actually seeing the experience of the individuals. So I think like those human psychology pieces are important for, for sales and marketing to get a different understanding of each other. But but then I also think that there's a, I'd love your opinion on this. I also think there's a lack of understanding from sales, on what marketing is called job is, marketing is not advertising. And, you know, marketing is about building markets. And, and that's why, you know, we look at, you know, we talk about things in, in any sales process of, you know, what's the total addressable market or tam of a product. And that might vary between your products. It might vary between regions, it might vary between segments. And so I think that's the piece that sales don't have a good appreciate salespeople often don't have a good appreciation for is the job of a marketer is not necessarily just to build you the pitch deck. So your next deal is going to go go more smoothly. It's to build you an entire series of pipeline, in order for you to have those engagements on an on a, as you said before, on a long term, ongoing basis. Yep. So I think those things are a key gone.

Randy Littleson: 27:39

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think, thinking about the market, there's actually a CMO group that I'm on and one of the things that networking group and that one of the things they espouse is that Chief Marketing Officer, in some respects, does a disservice that should really be chief market officer, which I think Dan goes right to the point that you were making, right, it's, it's really about understanding the market. It's really about the customer experience overall. Right? And I genericized customer, because it's really prospect and customer, you want that entire experience, right? Because at the end of the day, ultimately, it's around driving growth. That's everything that we're trying to do is to drive growth, right. And, you know, you talked about your, your Tam, for example. Well, part of that understanding the market, part of that ability to drive the growth is understanding what the total addressable market is, but also understanding what the ideal customer profile looks like, understanding who's in market for your solution and being more focused on getting in front of them and building awareness and then helping them move through. You know, one of the things I've always looked at content is an important thing in marketing, right? Because people need content in order to answer their questions during the buying process. And fundamentally, what we want to be able to do is we want to identify who the right people are to be getting in front of the right people that are in market from an account perspective and the various personas. And then depending on where they're at in the buying process, you want to feed them up the content that is pertinent and resonates for what they're trying to achieve at that part of the the buying process, right. And again, going back to the buying committees and everything else, there could be multiple personas, and it person's got a different lens on it than a finance person than a salesperson in a buying process. So the more that we can understand and really understand the market, deliver that great experience, and have sort of the insights to understand who's in market who are the personas, where are they at in the buying process, get them the information they need, give them a great frictionless experience, that we're going to be a good partner to sales and helping to drive growth and that fundamentally is what it's all about.

Simon Peterson: 29:53

thinking through what you just described, and obviously most of our audience is based in Australia or New Zealand or in the ape region as a CMO, you're looking after, it's all about money, right? You've got a budget at the beginning of the year, you got to place your bets, you have a company that's looking to grow by X percent. Therefore, as a CMO, here's your budget to grow, market drive pipeline, closed deals, etc. A lot of our listeners, sales leaders, salespeople, when we're sitting here in Australia, we know the CMO sitting somewhere in North America for most of the software companies that I've worked for, for the last sort of 10 years, or Europe, etc. As a sales leader have often come into a new year, I've got big growth plans, my boss, who's typically the chief revenue, officers told me to add 40% to my number we need to grow. And then sometimes there's a disconnect between how my targets are set. Yet, you as a CMO, look globally and say, Look, I need to put 90% of my funds this year into North America sorry, Asia pack, you get 5%? Amir, you get five? It's not always that terrible. But how is a leader in Australia? How do I go about giving you as a global cmo perspective of what you need to do to invest in the Australian market? Because I think a lot of Australians in this in the sales game often feel second, or third or fourth or fifth in line for funding? How do we make a better case for spending money in our region?

Randy Littleson: 31:35

Yep. So I think there's two things that come to mind. The first and the foremost is is like any other relationship, the more familiarity is the more it's top of mind. Right. And that's a duel. That's that's not a one way statement at all. That's, that's the responsibility of the head of service, the head of marketing, the head of finance, the head of right of any group, as well as it is the people in region. So I think that familiarity is hugely valuable. I think the second thing is, is that what I've always strived for, and when Dan and I worked together, I think we had this decent, we weren't perfect yet. But it should be largely a fact based discussion. It shouldn't be you having to argue for it, the facts and the data should spit out that that investment should be there. And so what I've always tried to do, we had a pretty good model for this was, you start with what the bookings goals are for the year. Right, and you take a look at what the bookings goals are. And then that usually goes into a quota allocation model of Guam, right. And it starts to look at bytes segment by geo by right by team and everything else, what the expectations are in which obviously, for bookings, and then you can look at the growth goals from that, obviously. And then we've always created pipeline goals directly off of that. So we would look at and you know, even getting down to if it's an existing customer versus a new customer, what are the conversion rates, and therefore, what's the coverage that we need and pipeline relative to bookings? So it's a it's a big set of calculations. But you can get this pretty scientific, right and starting to look at where should we be investing in that. And then once you get that number, then between sales and marketing, we can have a discussion that says, Okay, well that I'm going to make up numbers, the numbers spits out, we're going to put 10% here. But we're, we need to invest some this year. So we're going to round that to 12%, because or 15, or whatever, right? Because despite what the numbers tell us, for the various circumstances, we want to make an investment there, we're going to pull some money and be able to do that. So. So I think first and foremost, building the relationships, having that familiarity having that regular dialogue. So it's not just at the planning time is hugely advantageous. Secondly, the planning process itself should be formulaic to the point of getting you pretty good facts and data to understand, based on the bookings in the bookings, growth by geo by segment by team and everything else. Here's what pipeline I need, here's what type of investment I need to be able to make. And then you can have a little bit of subjectivity around a discussion around hate goes in the following circumstances. We're going to do a little bit of shift here and there, but it should be largely driven off of facts and data.

Simon Peterson: 34:20

Yep. Love it. Yeah, I

Daniel Bartels: 34:21

think that's an important piece. Randy. I mean, if you look at as a sales leader, you know, most sales will come from inside of sales, or I've been an ad before I've run some great deals. And someone at point along the line says that look, if you get the rest of the team to do that great, you get promoted and often is actually you lose a little bit of money to make some more money than the massive pit. Anyone think about doing that going from being an AE to being a leader do the maps properly, it may not you may not make more money in the first instance. But it's about building a machine. And it's about understanding the annual cycle for what that looks like and the combination but Between, you mentioned before going from the short term to a long term, it's at least going from the short term to the medium term as a leader to understand how many people do I have? What are those people need to run out at? What level of efficiency or what level of sales productivity is another key driver here around, you know, the the red, the red, the cost of the hair wages to the output they have for revenue, then what marketing input do I need to put in in order to generate the pipeline that they can actually build on? I've got a customer helping coach at the moment. And talking her through the concept of how many deals can an individual rep run at one time? Yep. And if you go up the scale, as you grow the size of deal, then the number of deals you can run actually comes down doesn't go up. And, and does. So what level does that ratchet so I'm actually not getting a better outcome from the person but I'm getting better deals is that what my company wants, because we don't want to grow the customer success or delivery or by 3x, we only want to grow them at one and a half x for the next year. So we want to need to get as all those things start to come into your model. And then you do different things with who you're marketing to, or who you're building a market for. And how you then advertise and promote to those to bring them into your pipeline. So I think that's the key for me, a great sales leader, it's not just the coaching inside of deal, it's understanding that machine at the same time.

Randy Littleson: 36:33

I absolutely agree, right. It's about building things that to the extent that you can get more predictability into the pipeline generation, the to the extent that we're all going to sleep a lot better, right, it's getting the measurement, getting that machine in place that has some degree of predictability is hugely advantageous, right. And if you think about it, from the selling side, sales teams have done a really good job over the years with tools and methodologies and processes around forecasting, bookings, forecasting pipelines, a hell of a lot harder, right, and most companies aren't nearly as good at it. So to the extent that you can pour energy into that, and get better at that, we're all gonna sleep a lot better, because you can't get bookings without pipeline, right. You can't get revenue without bookings, you can't get bookings without pipeline. So all of those things need to be tied together, it goes back to that formulaic and getting to that. One other thing that I mentioned that you brought up, right, I also spent a lot of time trying to think about what's the ratio of people versus programmes in marketing? Right, because, you know, marketing is of all the groups within a company has the highest percentage of discretionary budget of any group, right? Most other teams are people in like track, right? We have this discretionary funds that we want to leverage for growth, right? Getting that balance of, well, what percentage of it is people versus programmes, and everything else is also important to think about, right? Because if, if you go too far in either direction, right, if you have way too many people, you don't have enough leverage in your model, there's not enough programme dollars for those people to spend, it's gonna give you the lift and the leverage that you need, right? Likewise, if you go the opposite direction, and you have too many programmes, and not enough people, now you don't have the expertise to be able to invest that wisely. And you're probably going to get a poor return on it, right? Because you don't have the skill sets and the people actually invest in, manage that investment, put the measurement in place and put the adjustments in place that's always needed with these programmes in that. So you got to play around with that, and really work hard to try to get that ratio, right. And figure out what that leverage point is for your business. Yeah,

Daniel Bartels: 38:41

I mean, so I mean, that's something that we've done in the past, where it's almost we've talked about it in terms of where do you make your bets. And particularly if you're in region, and it might be there's a scale, North America has is able to run 10 programmes this year, or five programmes would have been an over the number B. But because of you know, our comparative size, we can only execute maybe two of them well, right. So what are our bets gonna be? And then how do we get better? We're talking about how do you get sales marketing to work together? How do we then get our salespeople and our our go to market motion? So expanded outside just the salesperson who's delivering this? How do you get your customer success person and your sales engineer, and your delivery person, whoever it may be, to all be understanding the messaging so that when the customer gets the product, it aligns to what they thought they were buying from the market that we built. But our bets aren't all of those, and then communicating back to the business that says, you know, back to your kind of planning on the numbers and what's the spend? We know there are five motions that are happening in North America, we can't do three of them. We just don't have the dollars is actually more often than not, not actually the problem. It's the time and the effort. Yeah, I don't have the people that can execute on that. So great. Thank you for bringing them to our attention. But I can't do them. And I think so many I mean, Simon, you know, we've got some great stories on this where early on, we kind of probably didn't push back on some of those areas, and we spread ourselves way too thinly. And then we're criticised by not executing any other things well, and you know, what we did well afterwards was actually go back and say, Listen, we're not, we're not going to do these three,

Simon Peterson: 40:25

completely agree, I look, I think, you know, it's when you first start leading a region or big sales team, and you're given a wad of cash to go spend on marketing, the temptation is to, hey, I got a tonne of money can't hurt, I'll go spend it. But I think what we learned is, it's if you're given five or six campaigns to go run, it's better to actually nail two or three of them really, really well. And then potentially not spend everything you're given and have something in the hopper. When it makes sense. I think, look, I think the other thing is certainly in the in a small region like ours, we talked a little bit about collaboration before. One of the big lessons I learned and I think it's an advantage actually for a and Zed or APEC over potentially North America is it kind of know everybody in every role, because we're a lot smaller. So all know, the customer success, people are consultants, the solution engineers are salespeople and marketers. And if we've got a programme of work coming out, that's being funded by marketing to go build pipe very easily, I can jump the silos of each of those different parts of the business, because we're typically sitting in the same office in a smallish team. And so my customer success, people know precisely what the campaign I'm running. And when they're talking to customers, they'll actually raise the messaging etc, with their customers and talk directly to the salespeople, I think, huge advantage in original size, to make sure that's messaging, messages go across. So find now two or three, really well go deep, I'm going to get a great return on investment, I'll probably have a CMO that rings me and says, How are you delivering that marketing ROI, and you're not even spending 100% of the dollars I gave you. Now, the flip side of that is be careful about leaving money on the table? Because we all know what annual budgets are like. And a lot of times if you don't spend it, you don't you go into the next year with a net net negative marketing expense. So that coming back to what you said, Randy, I think communication and relationship are absolutely fundamental in that, you know, if you and I have a conversation, Randy, you say, Look, his 5 million bucks, go spend in ANZ, the next 12 months. And I say, look, let's let's hone in on two or three programmes, but I want to keep you posted. And I might only use two or 3 million of the five. But let's have that conversation going on. So when I say hey, I've got this awesome opportunity. It's unplanned, but I still got some money left. This is what the return is going to give you we we can be flexible and be malleable about how we execute. And I think the way you execute and Amir versus North America versus Zanzibar, all subtly different. And you've got to be a little bit careful about that, I think. Yep. Actually, one question. I'll

Randy Littleson: 43:24

give Dan props, because one of the things I was really impressed that Dan would do is we had multiple products that we could sell. And I think he took a very holistic sort of customer centric, long term view and said, Look, we're not ready to sell these products yet. So why put any investment in them? We don't have the partners, we don't have the implementation. And had we gone down that route just chasing things, I guarantee you, I'm sure his team probably would have sold a couple and they probably wouldn't have gone very well. Right. And then that is a really bad hole to get dug into right as you're entering a new rage. And you get some really unhappy customers with with an offering or whatever that's. So I really appreciated Dan, looking at that longer term view, customer centric view, where to put the dollars that we could really get results today while we build out capability to go to some of the other products in the future. It's not that we didn't want to, we just weren't ready yet. And I think that collaboration and that dialogue was really, really helpful to make sure that we didn't try to just take what we're doing. I think Dan said 10 things in North America, we're going to go do those 10. And as I said, we weren't ready to do half of those even if we had the capability to because we couldn't successfully implement and make those customers happy. And I think that was a really, really good outcome to not do that.

Daniel Bartels: 44:39

Yeah, I have to meet Sam Simon. And I actually had to unpick some of that in a previous role right where we inherited a series of customers who had been sold products that the company 100% owned and could deliver the product. But it's a little bit like you know, just the simple analogy. I can get you a car. But if you can't drive the thing, it's a lump of steel in the front of your yard. What's the point? What's the point of having the car in the first place? And that is so really hard to recover from? Absolutely. And really, we have to go the long way of actually taking an organisation. And then it's a really hard conversation again, using the car analogy. It's a really hard conversation to go and have if you're if you're a an auto dealer, that I need to go and build a petrol station. Hold on, we sell cars, what do you mean, you need to build a petrol station? Well, the nearest petrol station from here is 1000. That is 1000 miles away. And our cars only have 600 mile range. The cars get here, and they've got no petrol.

Randy Littleson: 45:43

It sounds like you're selling an Eevee. Now,

Daniel Bartels: 45:47

whatever it may be, right. But but that's the experience. And I think, and that that's a, that's when marketing and delivery and everybody, what's the market? What's the deliverable? How does the customer get to the end, not to the beginning of the process, and so many salespeople fall foul of that, which is, you know, we've all been in those organisations where delivery and sales hate each other, because sales keep kicking over the fence these shitty deals that no one likes, but hey, I booked it. It's booked in? No, no, it's not booked, because I've had to give back 50% of the revenue because the customer can't use the stuff that we sold them. And I'm not going to court every time to try and get the money back. Right. So but I mean, then this kind of segues into the the next conversation that I know we wanted to talk about, which is building building a pipeline, building, the number of organisations you can talk to, is a tip that typically falls into some sort of business development function. Every organisation calls them something different. And there is always this tension. And I reckon in my sales career, I've been asked this question 100 times by different either organisations of startups, where does BD sit? And, and I and I don't have a good answer to this question. And I've seen organisations put business development in marketing, I've seen organisations put it in sales, I've seen organisations spin it out as their own piece, our own equation. And, and I walking through the logic of, you know, the pluses and the minuses of doing it either way, I would love to get your opinion of the, the benefits, but then also the real challenges of BD sitting in marketing. And then I think we can discuss, you know, vice versa, what it looks like in sales the other way. What are your thoughts on that?

Randy Littleson: 47:33

I think it can work either direction. And I think it can fail miserably in either direction. And let me explain what I mean by that, right, because I think where it sets is actually less an issue, and more of the leadership, the structure, the discipline, the roles, and all of that being defined as more of the issue, because I've seen it work in both right. So I think the first thing is, what's their charter? Is it securing meetings? Or is it inside sales? Or is it both? If the charter of this group, and again, whatever you call them, I agree, BDR? Is STRS, whatever you want to call them, right? If the charter of this group is to secure meetings, then don't let people turn them into sales inside sales reps, right, that are doing grunt work for the field reps, right, because now they're not doing their charter. And that's one problem that you can have, if they report to sales, believe me, if they report to marketing, the same problem can happen if you don't have the right leadership, discipline, structure and everything else. It can be exacerbated a little bit if they're in sales. But I think number one, defining the charter is really important. I think number two is clarity of who's giving them direction. You know, where I've seen it go bad in the past is when the SDR BDR, or whatever is getting direction from their manager, the AE that they work with the AES manager, the marketing team that right and there's no clarity of who's giving them direction. And that doesn't mean that direction can't get inputs from all groups. But it's got to be channelled and clearly communicated. Not coming from all groups coming into the management team that gives clarity of purpose and direction and clarity to them. Right, you start pulling them in a million different directions that goes all over the place, right? I think understanding sort of, are they inbound outbound? Are they doing a little bit of both? What's their purpose, right? So the inbound stuff is generally working on marketing source generated stuff and the outbound stuff. Hopefully, it's not doing cold calling, hopefully, they're reaching out to accounts that are in market and you know, you've got some engagement with and so on. And the proper metrics to be able to make sure you've got that. Yeah, I think that's really hugely important is the business development roles and responsibilities and rules of engagement relative to the ad, right of when are things handed over? If somebody comes back in when do they retain ownership of that versus it goes round robin in good scope, right? There's a whole bunch of rules of engagement. To me, all of these things, what are their goals? What are their charters? What are the rules of engagement? Where are they getting direction from getting all of that stuff defined, clearly communicate, and that is so much more important than which group it sits in. Because I've seen if that is clearly defined, I've seen it work in marketing, I've seen it work in sales. And I've also seen where that stuff's not clear, and you've got all those things happening, it really doesn't matter where it reports to, it's going to struggle. Because these poor people are getting pulled in a million different directions with lack of clarity, right? You know, lack of purpose and everything else. So I think there, there are some subtle pros and cons to being in right the inbound stuff, if it's in marketing, it's probably going to get, you know, it's not going to be ignored. You got, you know, that outbound focus with the reps and fits and part of sales. It is, you know, in portion, it is a sales oriented role, but it sort of, it sort of sits on the fence between the two. And that's why I think at the end of the day, it can work in either it's getting those other things right, to me is more important than physically where it says. And ultimately, at the end of the day, that's because at the end of the day, if these groups aren't working together with clarity of purpose, and how those are orchestrated, it really doesn't matter where it sits, it's going to fail anyway.

Simon Peterson: 51:30

Spot on, spot on, I got a question that sort of pops up out of that. We've got a the last five or so years, I've noticed the number of tools available to marketers and to sales, people to be quasi market is exploded. I won't mention the tools by name, but there are you know, there are tools that we're expecting ourselves people to use that look at their territory and say, who's engaged on my website? who's engaged, who's using an active buying cycle, etc. And that's obviously the holy grail you as a salesperson, you want to know who's moving and who's doing what. And that, to me, those sorts of tools are very much blurring the lines between early stage sales process and marketing process. And I'm interested in your thoughts around those tools that, you know, I think have become fairly ubiquitous in the last five years. Very, very different to being a seller 10 years ago. Is it something that you like as a marketer is? How does that impact how you succeed?

Randy Littleson: 52:40

Love them. I think that is absolutely where we're going. Right, because they acknowledge a couple of different things. They acknowledge that number one, it's about accounts, and buying committees. So they sort of take that traditional lead paradigm and that, and they flip it on its head, and it's about account based. And those tools fundamentally are trying to help you do more account centric activities go to market activities at scale. And to me, that's the way people buy today, right? It's accounts by people on at work, those accounts are part of the buying committee, and they ultimately are the buyers, right. And those systems are good at that. Right. They also take into account what we talked about earlier, right? That the buying process today is very complex. People can do a lot of research in what's called the Dark funnel out there, right? Doing a lot of research without telling you who they are yet, right? These technologies help you identify who's in market and everything else. So going back to what we talked about earlier about identifying who your tam is, and who your ideal customer profile is, and who your in market, ideal customer profile accounts are in that very, very advantageous. Yeah, the ability to orchestrate the sales and marketing activities, to those in market accounts to the personas that we know are part of the buying team and give it give them personalised messages based on where they're at in the buying journey. Very, very, very hard to do without the right technology. Right. So you know, these, these technologies can help you do that. So I think everything that we've seen the evolution of the buying slash selling process now in the b2b world, these tools are are the new paradigm of how you go about addressing them. So I'm actually a big, big believer in them. I think they're highly advantageous. I don't think the overwhelming majority of organisations have gotten there yet and fully figured it out. We're gonna probably stumble a couple of times as we figure this out. But I believe their ability to leverage AI and leverage their sort of predictive analytics and that is absolutely the direction that we need to be going account centric. Right. Everything that I just said, I think is absolutely where we need to go and we need to all lean in and figure out how to perfect these and make them work within our businesses. I think the latter and I think They can be a unifier between sales and marketing, because it's all about orchestrating our collective activities, to identify those accounts and market, move them through the process and ultimately generate growth. And these tools can help facilitate these two groups working together better. And by the way, a third group would be customer service customer experience teams. I think they're critically important, especially for existing customers, obviously. So I'm a big believer.

Daniel Bartels: 55:26

I think it's interesting at Randy heard a colleague told me the other day that there are kind of three different types of leads that we see, there's inbound, someone has heard about you wants to buy from you. There's outbound, I've gone to you, and then there's near bound. And I think all of those dark web models focus on the near bound. And what I mean by near bound is, I'm in the market to buy something that you probably sell, but I'm not quite sure yet. I don't either. I don't know about you, but I'm in your market. Whereas true outbound is, not only am I not did I not know that I'm in your market yet, I didn't even know that I had a problem that you sold, and you go and create that problem. And I think enterprise teams in particular, have been exceptional for a long period of time at doing inbound or true outbound. What they're not good at, is understanding that near bound market, because they don't, you know, the experience, often in that near bound piece is someone hit me with an RFP, my competitor has already been looking, and I missed the start on this race. Everybody else is at the 1550 yard line, and I'm still putting my shoes on at the blocks. And you pass those ones by. And I think that technology is definitely going to change that space of understanding that bind committee has been formed. And all of a sudden, a whole bunch of people started looking in my space. Okay, and they have now how do I start to really differentiate that that outbound messaging to, to get in early and have those conversations where I need to? Because I think we're we're so much I know myself as an enterprise seller, I'm designed to contact if I'm selling marketing, tech, conduct a CMO and create an opportunity where it just didn't exist yesterday. That's, that's where I'm at, that's where I have my best outcomes. Often that the best deals they take the longest, but they're often the, you know, I have built a market specifically for the problem that I solve. Whereas the near bound tech, it becomes an interesting way of using all these these insights to really identify what I'm what I'm solving and what I'm selling.

Randy Littleson: 57:38

Yeah, I think the promise of these technologies are and I'll make some simple examples, right? Let's say that your tam is there's 1000 accounts that you could be selling to, right, and of them, there's 500 of them, that really your ideal customer profile, right, they're really fit based on who you've sold to in the past. At any one point in time that the statistics are there's, you know, 5% of them are actually end market at any one point in time. So I think what the statistics are bearing out so far is of the 500 that are your ideal customer profile. If only let's say it's 5% of them are in marketing at one point in time, do you want to be cold calling into the 95%? Or do you want to be warm calling into the 5%? Yep. And what the promise, the conversion rates, obviously should be a heck of a lot higher if you're getting to that 5%? If you're not, you know? So I think and I made up numbers for the point of illustration, right. But I think the promise of this technology is, is if I can take my in market ICP, and that's where I set my outbound people, the odds of that, and those were people that were starting to go in market for your solution, but haven't exposed themselves to you yet. Right? Because people don't fill out forms. People do a lot of their research on their own well, before they come to you. Right. So if I can get in earlier with those people that actually in market versus the 95% that could buy for me in the future, but they don't have an active project at all, I'm going to have so much higher conversion rates by focusing on those ones that if you can get to them early enough, obviously. That's the promise of it. Right? It's it's more it's an efficiency trade off, right? That's your, it's instead of, you know, spray and pray. It's actually a much more targeted specific to people that are in market, and that you can go directly to them.

Simon Peterson: 59:27

So, Randy, I'll jump in there, mate. So I guess a question as we sort of get to the top of the hour. You know, we've talked about tools we've talked about targeting earlier. Just your your two cents worth on what's about to change with AI in this space. I would imagine your basic analytics, you're scouring the web for who's looking at cetera. I think, you know, AI should probably take another giant leap forwards.

Randy Littleson: 59:57

I don't think it fundamentally changes the role. I think it makes it way more efficient and targeted. Yep. Because fundamentally going back to what we've talked about earlier, right, marketing's job is ultimately to understand the market understand and create that great customer experience to identify who is possible to buy the technology and get in front of them with content and information they need to help them move through the process. Fundamentally, none of that change. It's how we do it, and how efficient we are and how effective we are doing it. Another great example, you know, taking a slightly different where I think the same thing applies is generative AI is all over the place. Not right. So, you know, there's some people out there that are talking about, Well, Jennifer, generative AI should allow me to, you know, maybe cut back on the number of people I have, why would you do that as your default reaction, right? What it allows us to do is to more efficiently and more effectively go after a bunch of stuff that we've been trying to do. One of the biggest challenges that every marketing department I've ever managed has is we always want to go to market by vertical or by persona by whatever how hard it is to do that at scale. Yep, to create content for all them. And then to personalise. It's, you know, I think a lot of people live in fantasy land, that we're going to be able to create all of these completely personalised, if you think about the matrix and combinations of all the things that we're talking about. It's very hard to do at scale. But all of these tools that we're talking about this AI can help me now start to do that, and do it at scale in a much more efficient way. So I can get a productivity boost. Now for my content, people that have been creating content, maybe generically, and now I want to create verticalized versions of it. I haven't been able to do that, because I haven't had the resources when I'll generative AI, it gives me a boost in efficiency and able to actually start to attack some of that stuff. So right, I look at these things is not fundamentally changing the role of what marketing is doing, but dramatically and transforming the efficiency and the effectiveness by which we do the things that we need to do. That's why I'm so bullish on it. Right? I've, I've spent a lot of time over the last several weeks, and that really digging into this I'm a huge advocate of the value that they can deliver in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

Simon Peterson: 1:02:11

It's exciting times to come. Who knows, we may one day get to our four day we're excited. Yeah. I might hand over to you, Dan, I think we're at the top of the hour. Oh, he's lost his voice. Look, Randy, is we, I guess the top of the hour. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for coming on the podcast, I think, honestly, your insights have been fantastic. And it's always lovely to hear from a CMO around what, you know, what sellers do, how we can improve. You've given some great insights. I think, for me, some of the key takeaways. It's all about collaboration. We need to talk to each other, we need to understand what we're doing. There's a lot of great new tools out there that we should be taking advantage of. But I think fundamentally it comes down to as a sales guy, I need to understand what you do in marketing and as a marketing person. You need to understand what we do we need to align we need to talk and it's it's not rocket science. We just need to work together. So Randy, again, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for coming on the growth pulse podcast. For those listening, please. Like this chair