Ep. #6, Aligning Sales and Marketing Departments

Marcy Campbell: I think there's a big piece of social selling that's not getting done today. There's this line you have where you don't want to stalk people. Especially in an early stage company, what you wanna do is you wanna go out and use the sales folks to test the messages and see what's working early on.

You want to have PR focused around your wins and you want to have customer references. Just PR for PR's sake I think doesn't work.

Our competitors were doing PR every day. And after a while it's just noise.

Malia Powers: Welcome to the Pitch Room. I am Malia Powers with Heavybit. On this show, we regularly talk about all things PR, including current events, crisis comms, PR tools and tips, reputation management, all with a special focus on developer communications.

Each episode will bring you actionable tactics and strategies that you can implement today for real business results. If you are interested in being a guest or have a subject that you would like to hear about, email us at press at heavybit.com.

Today we're gonna be talking about how sales and marketing departments are really two different unique entities. And we're gonna be discussing tactical ways that they can work together and then ultimately improve business performance. I have with me today an awesome sales expert, Marcy Campbell. I think now's a good time to introduce yourself.

Marcy: Hi, I'm Marcy Campbell. I'm the Senior Vice President of Sales and Business Development at Qubole. Qubole is a big data as a service company. We're in our Series C and we're located in Mountain View in Bangalore.

Malia: Great. Thanks for joining us today. I think you can go ahead and just kick it right off.

Sales and Marketing at Odds

Do you agree with the theory that sales and marketing are often at odds with one another?

Marcy: They can be. I think that companies that are working well and have a well-oiled machine, they actually work well together. I think you have to have a certain amount of respect for each one of those functions.

Where I've seen them work well is where the executives have respect for one another, have clear communications about what they're trying to achieve and have put programs in place to have deep communications about the different systems that they're using or the different programs or the different messages that they're putting out to the market.

Malia: Yeah. One of the top level things of communications is identifying goals. And each department has different goals.

I've been in some heated discussions where the sales department is saying the marketing department's number one goal is sales, period, hard stop. And then they're saying, well, no, the function of sales is to do the sales and the function of marketing should be generating awareness, getting a funnel so that the sales team can do the sales. What do you think about the differentiating goals?

Marcy: Yeah, I think the goals come from the top, right? I think what you have to do is have a series of company goals that are laid out.

So for example, you have KPIs and in those KPIs what you do is you say, okay, what we're gonna do from a revenue perspective this year, how many customers are we gonna drive? What is our brand going to represent? How many partners will we have? What are our financial goals in terms of break-even or raising more money?

And I think that what happens from that is that if you do it right in your planning, sales and marketing will build out a program that says, well, how do you get more customers in the front end of the funnel? And then how do you build the messages that create brand awareness that allow you to beat your numbers?

If sales and marketing are working on their own, you're gonna have a big disconnect because especially in an early stage company, what you wanna do is you wanna go out and use the sales folks to test the messages and see what's working.

When I joined Qubole, we really didn't know who our customer was. We had a number of customers, but we had one very large customer and a bunch of smaller customers. And my job early on was to come back to the company and tell them, here's what I think the sales cycle was and here are the messages.

We are pretty granular right now. We work very closely with the marketing department because we've created this persona-based messaging. We have our complex sale. We know we have to go to the VP of analytics. We know we have to go to the VP of engineering.

We know we have to talk to legal, security. And we have to talk to data scientists. And each one of those, our value is different to each one of them.

So if we were to just blast one organization with one value proposition like total cost of ownership, we can reduce your cost of ownership, people just glaze over.

But if we can talk about the fact that we provide a invaluable infrastructure for Spark notebooks to a data scientist, I think that's where that data scientist will get interested.

We rely on marketing very, very heavily to connect the dots around what the product can offer, what value it has to each part of those personas, and then how does it work in an enterprise sale model, and when do you actually attack each portion of that?

And that's from brand awareness with PR and articles and blogs and points of views, all the way down to the messages and the templates that you give inside sales to reach out to prospects.

Scoring Leads Together

There is a really valuable process you can put in place early with an MQL, SQL process, right? So the idea is that where marketing and sales work together well is when you sit in a room and you say, okay, here's how we're gonna score a lead. We're gonna use these different variables. And sales has input into this.

So the sales says, yes, my persona, we're looking for these titles. So if VP of sales comes in and they're using a trial, they're not our target. But from a marketing perspective, they're like, well, how do I get from the VP of sales to VP of engineering?

So the company's valuable and the trial might be valuable and the fact that we've got somebody outside of our target that's using the product or trying to use the product may tell you something. It could just be that that person's looking for a job.

So the idea is to have a very precise methodology around the MQLs. It's an agreement. It's a handshake agreement between sales and marketing.

Malia: Okay. And can you give our listeners a definition of MQL?

Marcy: Yeah, it's a marketing qualified lead, sorry, and a sales qualified lead. So basically what happens is marketing will start the brand awareness or they'll start some output or their website will have a trial or they'll put some content in the website or there'll be an event. Those come in as marketing qualified leads.

And in MQL, what that is, is it's raw, right? We don't know anything about them. We might have a Gmail address. We might actually have their phone number.

But what we do is we qualify them and we qualify them against, I think I talked about this in earlier podcast, but which is COMSA, right? We have a five-step process that we qualify. If they meet those five steps, they become what we call a sales qualified lead.

And then we pass them to outside sales. So we have SDRs, right? Sales development reps. We don't have inside sales yet.

We may in the future. Right now our sale is very complex and it has multiple people in it, so it's harder to sell over the phone.

However, what we do is we can qualify really quickly as to whether or not someone can use our product. And I think we're lucky in that I have an outline of who is our customer. And that's also in agreement with marketing and sales.

If someone thinks we're going towards the mid-market and the sales thinks they're going towards enterprise, the messages are completely different. The methodologies of getting there is different. The marketing programs and where you would put money against those programs are very different as well.

So you have to make sure that everybody is aligned. And I think that's the job of the CEO.

Malia: It's the CEO, not the CMO.

Marcy: Yeah, I think the CMO is great, but his peer is a CSO or a VP of sales. I have seen sales report into marketing. That happened at Netscape when I was there. We had two different entities and then Mike Homer took over marketing.

And sometimes that works because you need to have everybody in the organization aligned, but I see it in bigger companies than in smaller companies. I think in smaller companies you want to have as much talent and as much conversation and discussion as you can.

And if you bring in a group of talented people around who respect one another and can have a discussion around the item versus a political fight, I think you can do a lot. And so having those entities be separate is good at the beginning.

Malia: Cool. So one question that I had is you talked a little bit about turning leads into qualified leads. And in order to get a qualified lead, you're gonna have sources that are the best for lead generation. Is there a process in place that helps the sales team communicate to the marketing department which leads are working?

Do you see that being a problem? It goes back to our talk about communication.

Marcy: Yeah, I think when it's really early, it's like, oh, I had four leads and let me tell you, three of them were not very good. But I think when you're going into volume, so when you have, right now we have ten SDRs and twenty reps out in the fields and we'll build that out to forty, you can't do it that way anymore, right?

So you have to have a process, or we use Salesforce and basically we have daily scrum meetings in the morning with the inside sales guys and at the end of the day where it's fifteen minutes. It's like, what are you gonna do today? How many calls are you gonna make? How many meetings did you set up?

And then what did you do today? How many contacts did you make, connects did you make?

We also have a process in Salesforce where people will check it and say, not qualified, invalid with a reason. And then also we are testing the leads so that we can multiply that factor, right?

So if we're doing an event, for example, like a meetup, we did a meetup with the AWS team in Seattle. And what came in was a great opportunity out of that. And it came in on its own and we were able to connect it to that event, then we say, okay, let's do more of those.

Versus, we used to go to the big data events where nobody was using the cloud and that's just not an opportunity for us. You come out of that and you've got a bunch of leads, three hundred leads, and you call every one of them and you put them in the machine, the marketing machine, to nurture.

They're not bad leads, they're just not ready. And so I think you have to decide which ones are marketing leads and which ones are sales leads that you can enable.

Routing and Nurturing Leads

Malia: Yeah. So a lead that is gonna come through based on the content that the marketing comes out, is that going to be a target for marketing to nurture for a little bit or is that going to be routed straight to the sales team?

Marcy: And that's an it depends question, right? So this is where I struggle, because sometimes you have trials. We route all trials right to the sales guys without going into the marketing machine.

And the reason we do that is that if somebody's actually trying your product, we want to find out what they're doing and who they are and how we can engage. Now if they mask their identity by putting a Gmail address and they're not responsive to our emails, we'll just pop them back into the marketing machine and let them, when they want to engage with us, we'll engage with them.

Where it gets tricky is when you do events, right? So the thing you need to have is you need to have a methodology that's systematic enough so that you're not going to drop the ball from a sales perspective. If you're going to take the leads before they go into the marketing, whatever it is, HubSpot or Marketo or Eloqua, you need to make sure that you have follow-up and you have a follow-on.

So for example, we work with a company called Spiderbook. And Spiderbook allows us to, they're a data science tool. And what they do is they allow us to go find all the companies at big data platform projects as well as cloud environments.

And so they give us like 600 names every quarter. And so we know those are targeted. They are COMSA. They're gonna fit our profile.

So what we do is we have the sales guys go after that first. And then what we do after a quarter is we put them in the marketing machine. Because the ones that haven't moved forward, and we got like a fifteen percent hit rate on it, was great.

But the ones that don't go forward are the ones that we put back in the marketing machine to nurture until they actually come out again as a 10 where we can engage.

Malia: Yeah, is there any statistics that you could provide there about a hit rate for how many times it takes to reach out to maybe that nurtured?

Marcy: I've talked to pros in this. I actually have hired some folks that are working with us now. And they're saying twelve to sixteen.

It's a lot more than we thought. We were initially thinking, okay, we'll touch 'em six times, right? Well, six times is actually not a lot, but there's this line you have where you don't want to stalk people. It's like you get to proactive stalking and people are just not going to engage with you.

So you've got to be careful about the content and make sure it's valuable to the people who are using it and they have sort of opted in to raise their hand to engage with you versus just cold calling.

Malia: And it's also the type of content, like we're so wired with short feed that constant short feed updates or interruptions are fine, but the moment you're sending like newsletters or targeted white papers, people are like, get this out of here.

Marcy: Yeah, I mean it's funny because we were working with Question Based Selling, which is Tom Freese's methodology, he came out to train us, and what he teaches on Question Based Selling, most people think it's like open end, closed end selling, it's not. What it is, is it's about being an expert in your area so that when you engage with someone, you create curiosity.

So it's about creating curiosity and someone says, "I will talk to you about MQLs and SQLs or marketing here because I know you're an expert in that area and we can have a deep conversation where I will get value."

So when you reach out to those folks, it is that short-term, very quick email that talks about value to them. And I've seen these emails that I get that are just dumps of, here's what we can do for Qubole, and I just delete.

Malia: Yeah. Being an expert in your area and showing that through content marketing is a really powerful strategy, especially for the dev tool companies because ad blockers are off. They're not interested in the advertising. So how do you get to these developers is you develop the answers to the questions that they're likely gonna be asking.

Marcy: Exactly. Right. So through FAQs and blogs that they check, as well as Twitter. You have to communicate to people in a way that they want to communicate with you, right? So when you look at developers, especially, they're big on Twitter, being able to reach out to them and have short conversations there and drive them to where content is, where they can see value.

I mean, they hate being sold. So what you will need to do is put them in a process that allows them to buy.

In my current job, we have more of a traditional sales cycle. So it's a little different, right? Twitter's a good tool for us, but it's not the only tool, right? So for us, it's about how do I build enough content, technical content, because we have a technical product with a technical audience.

And if you don't know the details of the infrastructure, if you don't know what an object store is, then you're probably not a customer of ours, right? So you have to get very granular and having conversations about best practices or even buyer's guide, like helping people buy, I think is a really powerful tool.

Community and Social Selling

Malia: Yeah, something else that I talk a lot of to our members about that's born out of the marketing department, but I'm interested in hearing how it affects the sales department, is the importance of network effect and fostering a community. So Stack Overflow is increased by the number of users and GitHub, Heroku, even by the plugins increasing. So it's usually born out of marketing, but I would assume it has immense impact on the sales side.

Marcy: Yeah, I think there's a big piece of social selling that's not getting done today. In fact we just hired someone who brought in a social selling plan, right? I think it's different than social marketing. I think it's about how do I engage people in the environments that they are in and create a word of mouth.

So last quarter we had two brand new big customers that came because the engineers that were in current customers left and got new jobs. And so it's like, how do I build a megaphone around that?

That's super important, is how do I get my customers to tell their friends and family and their constituencies that this is the product to buy or the service to buy.

Malia: So those leads are going to be the most valuable things. The referral automatically, I would assume, goes into a high quality.

Marcy: Yeah, and community is really interesting. Everybody equates community with open source, but I'm not so sure that's, there's a community of data scientists, there's a community of data analysts, there's all kinds of communities out there. And I think being able to leverage those communities in a meaningful way where it's of value to the community, I think is really important.

I think that's a very broad statement. So it doesn't add a lot of succinct value. But I think for each one of those communities you can get really creative about how to reach them and how to offer those communities something of value.

For example, we just did a free giveaway to universities, right, for our product because we want people who are getting their PhD in data science to use our product. So that just seemed natural to us. So we just announced it and we put it out in the market and hopefully it'll address a need the community has there.

Where PR Fits

Malia: Got it. And then just turning chips a little bit, I'm interested to hear your thoughts as an early stage developer company or a developer tool company in general, what the role of PR plays in the overall sales function, how you view PR internally, how it helps, maybe how it doesn't.

Marcy: Yeah, I mean PR is an important tool to have in marketing. I think I learned a lesson when I was at Engine Yard. I got to run marketing for about, I don't know, nine months to a year.

And what I found is that PR really helped, it was technical, right? And it was very focused when we were early, right? Early stage. You can't afford PR, first of all, and the brand awareness you can do in a number of ways, especially you can do it through community, you can do it through meetups, there are other ways to do that. PR becomes more important as you get broader in the market.

It's very hard if you're doing persona-based marketing to do, you have to do very targeted PR. And so I think it's a good tool. I just think that you have to determine your budget for it based on where you are in your life cycle of your company.

What was interesting to me was our competitors, when I got to Qubole, our competitors were doing PR every day. Every day I get a Google for each one of my competitors. They were putting something out in the market. After a while, it's just noise.

It's like, hey, we have a partnership with ABC Company, now XYZ Company. It's like, okay, this adds no value.

So I think early on you want to have PR focused around your wins and you want to have customer references. One of the things Amazon does really well, they will do no PR unless there's a customer quote and a customer reference.

So just PR for PR's sake, I think doesn't work. If you can talk about a new trend, if you can tie it to an initiative, and if you can tie it to customers, it works.

Malia: Yeah, in the early days there's always questions about, should we be announcing our private beta? Should we announce our public beta? When is the right time to do PR?

And as you were saying, customers are extremely important. And until you have that product market fit and you understand what's gonna turn your freemium leads into paying customers, that's the marketing message that you want to be leading with and that's when you start doing PR.

Marcy: Yeah, I agree with that. I think that makes a lot of sense.

The only other thing that I'd say is you can use other people's PR to create noise for yourself.

And what I'm talking about there is, if there's an event, like some other company, one of your competitors gets purchased, being able to or has an event or goes public, being able to get into that cycle and having your name mentioned in their press is super important. That's where it becomes interesting if you're a small company.

So if you look at when Heroku got bought by Salesforce, Engine Yard is mentioned in every single one of their press releases. So that to me was a win. Because my team and I actually sat down and when we heard about it, we're like, okay, we gotta engage PR here.

Malia: When I was at VMware, every morning from eight to eight fifteen a.m. we would have a news of the day call and just run through the news and see if there was anything relevant that we had either a point of view on or if it was a competitive announcement, what our reaction would be.

So getting in that news cycle via trend jacking essentially is a good strategy. And it's pretty low, it's not super time consuming either.

Marcy: Exactly. Right. So I think, though, I worked with a marketing guy a long time ago when I was at Kana who told me, you can burn that channel really quick. So you have to be careful about what you throw through that channel.

Malia: Yeah, not time consuming, but another question that you never have a good answer to is, how much time should you be spending on marketing PR in your early days when you should be building your product? My answer is usually never enough, but I'm also biased and interested to hear your thoughts.

Marcy: I think if you can be creative and do it for very, very cheap, if you can think about using channels like your blog or using Twitter or connecting with somebody else's PR, I think that makes a lot of sense. A lot of the startups, they just don't have budgets for it.

You talk about the daily calls with VMware. That's a big company, right? And it's super important that they have a PR engine working. It is brand awareness. It's being able to be at the table when people make decisions for their products.

When people don't know about you at all, what you don't want to do is just be spinning in the wind. You want to have a targeted point of view about something.

Now, there's an exception here, I think, in that if you want to pick a fight. So I'm a big believer in picking fights. And so you should find a big Goliath and go ahead and go pick a fight, be ankle biters. And you can do that through some different channels and PR is one of them.

Malia: So is there any companies that you've either worked for or that you've had friends worked for that you've seen do the PR, marketing and sales departments that have worked well together?

Marcy: I think my company works pretty well. I think from a sales perspective you never get enough PR. You're like, okay, where's the PR?

Where's the brand awareness, right? I'm on the PR calls during the week and so basically I have a point of view. Usually I bring the customer case studies. I'm like, oh yeah, we should talk to this customer.

We're lucky enough and our customers love our product and they're willing to talk about it. So that helps.

Malia: You find that customer case studies are a valuable tool for your sales team when they're published in the media?

Marcy: Yeah, sometimes. And let me tell you why. The challenges with selling technical products is you want to know why people use it. So a use case or a case study gives a framework for non-technical salespeople to go out and sell it, right?

So it's like, oh, let's look for recommendation engines, right? You have the ability to go and identify what a prospect looks like.

So that's important. In PR, if I am that prospect and I have that problem and I see somebody I respect being quoted, I'll go and I might be interested in your product.

Malia: Yeah, I found most successful in pitching journalists is leading with benefits rather than features when you're pitching these customer case studies, how much time is saved, how much money is saved, rather than just like X amount of speed.

Marcy: Yeah, and I'm a true believer in identifying the problem that you're solving first and making that problem really big. So talking about, like, most people sell the solution and then the alternatives, and then talk about the problem.

I think you have to identify the problem and then talk about the alternatives and then talk about your solution.

Who Owns the SDR Team

Malia: So earlier, Marcy, you were talking about SDR team and when leads are passed over to them. I'm interested in hearing about what department do they fit in. Do they report to marketing? Do they report to sales?

Marcy: I think it's either. I think there is a it depends answer and here's why. There's pros and cons to both, right? So we started the SDR team in sales at Qubole. It could naturally move over to marketing because it really is a lead gen engine.

And it's a lead gen engine when you don't have any other alternatives, right? I mean, you really don't wanna be cold calling, but we do wanna be following up on trials.

I think that the reason I say it could go over to marketing is because it makes marketing accountable for all the leads if they own all the processes.

Where the disconnect comes is a lot of times the SDRs are like, these are crappy leads. I don't like these things, right? Basically you're not getting good leads and they point the finger at marketing.

And marketing's like, well, I'll give you more leads. And so they give more leads, but they're not necessarily quality. If marketing owns both quality and quantity, sometimes that works better. So I think I can go back and forth and I don't feel like as the VP of sales I need to own the SDR group.

I don't. I just think where it works best is where it's most aligned. So if the SDR group gets more aligned because they are reporting up through the same structure, that might be where it belongs. If they need to be more aligned with the field sales reps and you build pods, then you might want to have them over in sales.

Malia: That's interesting. I've never heard that point of view. So basically what you're saying is it almost comes down to ownership. It does. Then with communication, and what does the overall quality of the lead look like and what's successful or not between marketing?

Marcy: The worst thing that can happen is that marketing sends a whole bunch of leads over into the SDR groups and they ignore them and they ignore them because they've had bad experiences with the other leads and they think, I can get better leads on my own than following through on the leads that you have in my bucket. Then you have a broken system because you've lost trust.

So one of the remedies there might be to move that organization. I just don't know. What's interesting to me is in the last, I had never heard that the SDR was working for marketing until the last two years, where people are like, oh yeah, I own the SDR group, and I'm like, oh, but you're a CMO.

To me it's like if the system works and we can drive more revenue, I'm happy with it being wherever in the organization.

Malia: Well, that's all we have time today. Thank you very much, Marcy, for your insights and this super valuable tactical information.

Marcy: Oh yeah. I'm happy to be here. I love what you're doing here at Heavybit.

It's great. And you've had some just fabulous companies coming out of here. I've had the opportunity to work with a number of them and they're really impressive and it's an impressive program. Thanks.

Malia: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Pitch Room, brought to you by Heavybit. Heavybit is a nine-month program and community for developer-facing startups. For more information, visit heavybit.com.