In this episode of Mastering Modern Selling, our special guest, MJ Smith, a seasoned B2B marketing leader with extensive experience in the industrial sector, shared invaluable insights that are shaping the future of sales and marketing.
Below are the five key takeaways from our enlightening discussion:
Engage, Inspire, and Innovate
MJ Smith’s session is a treasure trove of innovative strategies that challenge conventional sales and marketing approaches. His integration of personal leadership narratives into the company’s brand story, combined with a focused content strategy, provides a replicable model for sales leaders looking to elevate their game in the digital age.
In this episode of Mastering Modern Selling, our special guest, MJ Smith, a seasoned B2B marketing leader with extensive experience in the industrial sector, shared invaluable insights that are shaping the future of sales and marketing.
Below are the five key takeaways from our enlightening discussion:
Engage, Inspire, and Innovate
MJ Smith’s session is a treasure trove of innovative strategies that challenge conventional sales and marketing approaches. His integration of personal leadership narratives into the company’s brand story, combined with a focused content strategy, provides a replicable model for sales leaders looking to elevate their game in the digital age.
Welcome to Mastering Modern Selling relationships social and AI in the buyer-centric age. Join host Brandon Lee, founder of Fistbump, alongside Microsoft's number one social seller, carson V Heddy and Tom Burton, author of the Revenue Zone and co-founder of LeadSmart, as we explore the strategies and stories behind successful executives and sales professionals. Dive into business growth, personal development and the pursuit of excellence with industry leaders. Whether you're a seasoned executive or an aspiring leader, this podcast is your backstage pass to today's business landscape. This is Mastering Modern Selling, brought to you by Fistbump.
Speaker 2:Everybody, welcome to episode number 82, mastering Modern Selling. Carson, great to see you back Now. We've lost Brandon, but I think we've got a really good replacement for this week. Mj Smith, welcome. Hey, thank you for having me. So yeah, brandon, I think we'll be showing up here, possibly on the comments. I know he really wanted to make it, but he's stuck, I think, in Atlanta Airport or some airport somewhere along the line, so we'll try and do the best without him. I think today's episode is going to be really interesting. And, carson, I answered your take before we introduced MJ. People love practical experience. We were just talking. I think there's going to be a lot of practical stuff here, like really stuff. You should be taking notes and ready to apply.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you know what I think as we've prepared for the episode. One of the things that jumped out at me is not only the unique nuances of this particular episode and MJ's talk track, but really, to your point, that practical application things that we should and could be doing and changing within our way we leverage social and the way we go to market, the way we work with marketing today all of those things so really excited to dig in.
Speaker 2:And Brandon's here, ok, good.
Speaker 4:I was going to say we, we had a heckler last time. So I think, brandon, if we don't get that, heckler. We're going to need you to do some of it, yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, he will, He'll get it started. And if you're out there. Please let us know if you're out there, where you're from, where you're listening from. So, mj again, welcome, tell, welcome. Tell us a little bit about your background and kind of what you're doing, and I think we'll have a really good foundation to kind of kick off the conversation.
Speaker 3:Cool. Yeah, I am a B2B marketing leader. I've been working with industrial buyers for my whole career, so I started in-house at manufacturing companies in like hybrid product management and marketing roles and increasing levels of seniority within a large FTSE 100 manufacturing company called Halma. Last role I held there was VP marketing inside of one of their subsidiary operating companies and then made the jump over to SaaS and startups and right now I'm leading marketing and sales development at Colab Software. And that background in manufacturing comes in handy because Colab makes software for mechanical engineering teams building some of the most complex products in the world.
Speaker 2:Wow, so you've, and they're a venture funded tech company. I mean, would you consider Colab, your traditional sort of tech company? That you know Silicon Valley tech company?
Speaker 3:Colab has a lot of shared goals with your typical Silicon Valley tech company. You know the whole triple, triple, double, double, double thing, but we are headquartered out of Newfoundland, Canada. And so I think, because of that, it's a very different culture and a very different part of the world.
Speaker 2:Well, I think I'm just going to set the stage. When we were talking before, you said 19% of your qualified pipeline is coming from your CEO's LinkedIn activity. Do I have that correct?
Speaker 3:Correct Shout out to Adam Keating.
Speaker 2:All right. So let's start with that, let's start with the 19%, and then let's unpack that and kind of take us through, first of all, how you're achieving that, but maybe more importantly, how you got there and how you're maintaining that.
Speaker 3:Cool. Well, first of all, how do we know that?
Speaker 3:And there's actually a very simple trick, which is we just set up a custom opportunity source in our CRM which is called Adam's DMs, and so any opportunity that is sourced by somebody reaching out directly to Adam, either in his LinkedIn DMs or straight to his email address, gets categorized under Adam's DMs. So that's what counts in that bucket, and I would say it's really a two-step process for generating that interest that comes directly to him as opposed to via one of our company-owned channels. The first thing is getting the leadership team, the exec team, the whole company around rallied around a really exciting company narrative and, first and foremost, that is the narrative that really comes from the CEO. So if the marketing team isn't telling the same story as the CEO, then it's gonna be really hard for the marketing team to help the CEO create content on their personal LinkedIn. And then, second, just translating that into whether it's written posts or mixing in images or providing videos and product content, just creating a steady stream of stuff that they can post about.
Speaker 4:So I got a question. I find that statistic fascinating and I love the fact that you're tracking and quantifying it. How did it come about? And also, like, how involved is he in the day-to-day of constructing the strategy and what is the strategy? I guess it's kind of a three-prong question, but I'd love to know kind of the evolution of it. And then also like, does he have different formats and styles for different days? Like you know, we've obviously got a lot of sales folks and sales leaders that are taking this in, and obviously some C-levels, and you know, I think some of them have reluctance or hesitancy around posting, but also arriving at a strategy is probably what they struggle with most. So I'd love to hear more about the evolution of his strategy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think, if you go back to kind of the beginning, he saw other CEOs and other like leaders, even a professional services businesses, doing this a lot and he could. I think he just kind of had a bit of an intuition like hey, I'm interested in these people because they're posting, and so I think it was just that intuition of of hey, like you can create just an initial spark of like human interaction by being present on a platform like LinkedIn all the time and like LinkedIn has such scale that like, if you're creating human initial spark of human interaction at scale, like that must be valuable. So I think that was just his initial intuition. So he invested in it and it was, you know, it was kind of sporadic, right Frankly, like in it and it was, you know, it was kind of sporadic, right Frankly, like. Sometimes it still is, but at first it was kind of sporadic.
Speaker 3:But actually when I joined Colab and he was doing this before I joined Colab when I joined Colab, my mandate as I think the mandate of many CMOs, heads of marketing, is when they join a fast, growing venture funded SaaS startup is to build repeatable pipeline and actually at the time that that I joined, we didn't really have many repeatable pipeline sources at all Right, that's my job to build those but the most repeatable of them was Adam's LinkedIn and you could see how when he had more time to post or he was putting more energy into it, we got more pipeline from that source, and when he didn't, we got less pipeline from that source. And the pipeline was way up and down right Signal to noise in those early days is crazy. And so these days, obviously there are other repeatable pipeline sources that are up and running alongside his LinkedIn, but, to be honest, in the early days it was the number one source of pipeline for the company.
Speaker 2:Incredible. And who is the primary? You know your ideal customer profile. Is it an engineer or a tech person?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it would be like a director of engineering or a VP of engineering inside of a large manufacturing organization.
Speaker 2:Okay, Okay. So was he then, even prior to then, I assume targeting that sort of persona, right Going after those people, building his connections, building the relationships and targeting his content, the stuff that would make sense for that persona?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean early on he was like again, he was operating like a lot on intuition, you know, like, but I mean you founders often build the whole company around intuition in the early days, right, like I've perceived that there's a problem here. Adam was a mechanical engineer before he founded the company, so he has experience with the pains and the problems, so a lot of it is just like sharing the personal stories, and I think a lot of founders do this on sales calls every day anyway, right, and they do it when they're speaking to investors, and so it was really just like digitally replicating those things that you do a person to person anyway.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So let's you came in right or you know, he was kind of doing it sporadically. As you said, it sounds like you've definitely formalized things more and I know you talked a bit about even paid ads and amplifying it with paid and so forth. Kind of take us through what is the playbook right now and how it's working and obviously how you've probably structured it more but expanded it since you've. You know, come on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I think there are basically two types, two or three types of content that are in his content mix. First type is what I'll call like strategic narrative posts, and so Colab invested a ton of time and energy in building a consistent, really well thought out strategic narrative, which is basically, you know, it answers the question why change and why now, and we used Andy Raskin's framework for this. So he has a really, you know, famous, popular post. You can find it on Google If you type in best sales deck ever. It's about Zora's strategic narrative and it breaks it down into these different parts. We use this framework to build our own strategic narrative. I work directly with Adam on it, and so basically, we are all aligned as a company on why we believe our customers should change, why now, and how our product actually helps them achieve the change that they need to achieve right now. And so, because we put in that work up front and that didn't exist.
Speaker 2:Before you got there right, when he was kind of going sort of I won't say ad hoc, but more sporadically the first thing you did was kind of put a structured, clear narrative around the ICP.
Speaker 3:Yes, and so maybe not the first thing we did, but like we did it, we wrapped it up. We actually tried to do this twice. The first time it was not nearly as successful as the second time, but we wrapped up that exercise and we launched it to the company in December of last year, but we it was kind of in the works from like October. So Q4, you mentioned the stat of the 19% of qualified pipeline that was the Q4 stat. We started posting bits and pieces of it as it was kind of coming across the finish line as early as October of last year, and so this is like a two or a three page document. It's like a written narrative and you know it helps all areas of the company right, like we use it for our sales deck we're going to, you know we're about to launch a new um homepage in the next couple of weeks, um, so it is the backbone of the homepage.
Speaker 3:So it's that, like the LinkedIn side of things is not the only reason that we did this exercise, but because we did this exercise, everything is just so much easier. It's really easy to create compelling content that's aligned to um messaging that the leadership team and the founders really believe in and why they're building the company and we feed this stuff in a product as well. So because we did that, we can, as a marketing team, create like kind of like beginnings of posts for him, and he always cleans it up and makes it into his own words, but he's almost always aligned with the messaging, because it's messaging that he and I really worked closely on and that just creates like a consistent stream of messaging and insights. So that's the first category, and there are two more categories that we can touch on, but I'll pause there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, there's, I mean, and there's a lot of questions that are coming to my head right away, but is this predominantly like? Is he doing video? Is he doing written posts? Is he doing all of the above Kind of what is the mix in terms of just the type of content?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so predominantly written posts for the strategic narrative stuff, and it will often be sort of exploring a concept or answering a question and then explaining it through the lens of our strategic narrative. So, as an example, a question that we might answer in a LinkedIn post from Adam is why do engineering teams keep telling us that all their people are so burned out? Well, like, here are these things that have been evolving in the engineering landscape for the last 10 years that are actually producing burnout. Right, and here are some practical steps that you can take to to address that. And you know, maybe there's a small tie into how we build technology and why we build technology and why we can help companies make this shift. But that's a great example of a question that can be answered through the lens of why change? Why now?
Speaker 4:I love how you called that out, mj, and I think you know it kind of weaves perfectly into the tapestry of storytelling and what resonates with your target audience. You know I'd be curious of any other ways that you're leveraging technology or even AI and automation. Like what are you, how are you thinking about leveraging it? You know, because what I love about what you said as well is how it really you're staying authentic to his voice, right. So you know, even though you're giving some prompts and things of that stature, you know he's putting the polish and the human touch on it and I think that's so important.
Speaker 4:I have found that you know, a lot of times, like I'll do, I have my own show, I have a you know video series that I'll do, and a lot of times I'll even ask AI for a potential storytelling prompts and that might be the topic that I utilize that day for that post. I can go back and I can take the transcript to a show that I might have been on before and I can now excise that part of the transcript what I said and turn that into a post and, in essence, repurpose that content in a way that's very time effective and efficient, because I don't have to think of a net new thing to say, but I can post it like it's net new and it's my words. So I'd love to know, like, how you're thinking about leveraging some of these technologies, because you can't use them absolutely, but you can absolutely, you know kind of weave them into your strategy. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I will be the first to admit that I probably haven't thought hard enough about this. But one thing and I've been trying to push myself in that area more Insight Partners is one of CoLab's primary VCs and they have run some really excellent workshops on this, which is frankly any thinking that I have done in this area has absolutely been prompted by the amazing resources that they have provided, sources that they have provided.
Speaker 3:The one area that I have been experimenting with is around like AI does a good job of like summarizing like huge volumes of data and picking out, you know, the trends and the patterns, and so I think you could feed AI right like a stream of comments that happen on all of the LinkedIn posts, right Across many LinkedIn posts, or you know just unstructured data of posts from people in your ICP, and say you know, can you summarize this into like some themes? And then that might become one of those questions, right? So I gave the example of why are engineers so burned out? I think you could use AI to put in a bunch of unstructured data and have it feed you back some questions or lenses through which to write about your strategic narrative.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting, this strategic narrative, kind of as a manifesto right, for everything that you're doing in the organization and then, like you said, you can not only summarize it but probably use AI to even create derivative works and other things that can come out of that to potentially give you more content over time and maybe not use it as is, but it gives you a starting point right. It gives you that jumpstart for the things that are there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think what I've been struck by the most it's like this is a very hard project, right, because if it's not good enough, then it just won't function this way. And I told you know, we tried it twice. The first time we failed, so I have some personal experience with this being a hard project. But since we got it right, it's just it's really easy to write a sales landing page, right. We created a, we went out and surveyed 250 engineering leaders and, you know, generated a bunch of data, like, we wrote the survey questions using the strategic narrative as an input. We went out and surveyed 250 engineering leaders and generated a bunch of data. We wrote the survey questions using the strategic narrative as an input. Creating the content that went into the report using that data was so much easier, because there are just these really great points that resonate, that explain a lot of what's happening in our customer's world that you can just keep coming back to again and again. They just it really explains what's going on in an insightful way.
Speaker 2:So I know you said there was kind of the first part, what are the second and third? I think there were two more parts that you were-.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we talked about strategic narrative posts. The second piece is like just like what's going on with him right Day to day. So it's like a mix of you know, when he gets inspired and he's visionary, as I would imagine most most founders CEOs kind of are, he'll just write a post completely from scratch and those posts always do the best. And you got to check your ego at the door right. The CEO's own original content will always outperform the content created or assisted by the marketing team.
Speaker 3:But I think what maybe a lot of marketing teams that want their CEO to post don't understand is that you can't rely on the CEO creating the stuff from scratch for 100% of the posts posts, and the only reason he does this is because he also kind of enjoys it. So we have the advantage of him kind of enjoying it, but we also don't force him to create all the content from scratch all the time. This is maybe only 15% of his posts.
Speaker 2:So 15% of his points of the visionary type post are only about his posts.
Speaker 3:Yeah, just like he gets inspired by something that he heard on a customer call and he'll write about it, or he'll rant about it. Or he'll like go visit someone and he'll post a picture, or he'll post something about the team. So whatever he's excited about at the moment, that'll certainly provide a significant portion of content right 15, 15, 20 percent.
Speaker 4:It sounds like a lot of this, too, is via LinkedIn, mj, right Like so. There's a lot of posting that's transpiring from the CEO. Are there other avenues by which he's getting the message out and replicating the message? And I guess what I mean by that is a lot of times I'll try to tinker with different platforms and mediums, depending on who my target audience is. So I may have a very similar post or video that may go to my podcast or may be distributed via Twitter or X, or could be a Facebook post, uh, commercial page, or something along those lines, or my blog. Are there other mediums that you've seen, maybe have really worked well in these situations or have not, like I? Just I'm always interested in the process, the creative process, and what you've kind of tinkered with and how you've learned yeah.
Speaker 3:So what's been interesting for us is, um, what we have kind of done as a fairly small company we raised a series A in 2021, is we kind of just focus on dominating one channel, so we don't distribute Adam's content on very many other channels, and, I actually think, really focusing our resources on the one channel, linkedin and it's not just Adam, it's also the LinkedIn company Page, organic, and the LinkedIn paid.
Speaker 3:But we put a ton of energy and focus on that channel and, as a result, the qualitative feedback is really interesting. So obviously, there's quantitative feedback in terms of we be at a conference or a trade show and a prospect will walk up to you and be like oh, colab, yeah, I love what you guys are doing on LinkedIn and I think if we were trying to be on more channels at once because we're a small team, I don't think we'd be creating that effect of like oh my God, this company is everywhere on LinkedIn, so I would do it again the same way. But I also think that larger marketing teams should think about being on more than one channel yeah, makes sense, love that back to the content, kind of mix up.
Speaker 2:Does he post things that are personal? I don't know if he has a family or what his personal life, but does he post things that are, that are in his you know, I know, know Brandon's very passionate about the importance of mixing things up with personal posts and personal things. How is that? Or does he do that? And if so, how does that work?
Speaker 3:Sometimes Adam's personal story is like related to the company story. So he lost his father to cancer when he was in his late teens. His father was an engineer and that's kind of what inspired him to go into engineering, and he's talked about that publicly on his LinkedIn. He also, in his copious free time, organized a charity basketball tournament in his father's memory. That was hugely successful and, over the course of, I think, seven or eight years, ended up funding an entire new cancer wing of the hospital in Newfoundland. So he speaks about that.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I guess it helps if you're just like a really big hearted human and can share all those amazing things that you accomplish in your personal life as well really, you know, analyzes as well, but he's found on his posts that the personal ones get way more engagement, way more reach generally than the less, more professional ones. And I didn't know if you had seen a similar thing at all with with some of the stuff you were doing.
Speaker 3:I think that's probably the case. I post a lot on LinkedIn myself and I almost never post anything personal. So I think it depends, like, really what you're, what you're trying to get out of it, but I think, and I think it depends on your personality, you know. But I think the the benefit of sharing things that are more personal is like back to how we kind of opened the episode that like part of it is just human to human connection at scale right, and showing the human side of yourself is what kind of prompts that connection.
Speaker 3:But I do think you can overdo it on the personal as well.
Speaker 2:And another question back to content again. So obviously we're streaming this show on LinkedIn, so it's a form of LinkedIn. Do you do live shows and things like that on LinkedIn as well, with him or others, or is that something you're looking at doing? And if so, again, how has it worked or not worked?
Speaker 3:So we've been doing a recurring webinar series. We haven't tried streaming it to LinkedIn yet. We alternate the format. It goes keynote panel, keynote panel, um, so the panel has multiple experts from industry, um, and those are always fun because, um, people like to hear from other people like them, um, and we also get to learn from the guests. So we'll do the keynote and the panel on the same topic, we'll do the panel, we'll learn from the guests, and then we will take everything we learn from the guests as well as everything we know internally, and then we will build like a really robust keynote with our point of view, based on all of those insights on the same topic. And Adam just delivers that himself. And so the panel is great because you get to learn from people and it generally has a bigger audience because there's multiple guests that people are excited to hear from.
Speaker 3:The keynote is great because it creates a ton of repurposing content, because we control the narrative and the POV more when it is a single speaker from our company talking and those are two webinars, basically One's the panel and one's the keynote. Yeah, you do those. What? Twice a month or Two a quarter right now. We recently brought on a head of content and we might increase that.
Speaker 2:But that's up to her. So do you see in the future doing more video or live? Do you see that as kind of part of the playbook moving forward, or do you think?
Speaker 3:what you're doing now is a good, solid foundation, just continuing to do more of the same. One of our core marketing beliefs is that there's basically two ways that you can increase the amount of people that are interested in talking to you. One is by reaching new people that you haven't reached before, right. So how do we expand the audience? That goes back to Carson's question around how you're getting on other channels. Not everybody is on LinkedIn and certainly not everybody's on LinkedIn every day. But the other way is increasing the quality and the depth of that content, because we really believe that there are probably people in the audience that have seen our stuff a bunch of times but haven't converted because they haven't seen the right stuff or the right depth of stuff. So I'd say we're making investments in both of those areas, right, and I see live, I see video, as some of the ways to drill down into a greater depth of content and maybe reach some of those people that we haven't quite put something compelling in front of in their point of view just yet.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean two big themes that are jumping out at me today is, you know, one, just the value and the almost necessity of having not only a CEO but executive leadership prominent and present on the LinkedIn platform. The other I loved what you said, mj, about dominating the platform. You know, figuring out where's your audience and invest there. The beauty of LinkedIn is that it isn't just one singular area by which you can meet customers. It's not just through the power of the post. You've mentioned a number of other areas with the company page and doing the ability to do live events and stream, the ability to leverage video content.
Speaker 4:We talk on this show, too, about that mix of personal. I've found some of the posts that get the best traction. For me are ones where I might make some leadership analogy by posting a picture of my kids and talking about the importance of family and how you invest in relationships with also how you invest in the relationships with your teams, things that will resonate with others who also happen to be parents and happen to be in leadership, and that just happens to be my target audience as well. So I love what you said about dominating the platform. Are there any other areas of the LinkedIn platform or even sales navigator that you found exceptionally helpful, because I know I use both of them a lot, and especially even when you're looking at like what content is resonating with folks. You know I try to bake a smart link into just about everything I send out so that I get some telemetry on what are they reacting and responding to what's working.
Speaker 4:This didn't really resonate. Why? Maybe it was way too specific or focused. I could run this more at scale, or quite the contrary. If I needed to drive a more focused conversation, maybe I need to change my strategy and style. Have there been any other ways that you've learned from leveraging different facets of LinkedIn?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we also obviously do a ton on the advertising side of LinkedIn and then we do quite a bit with Sales Navigator, with our sales development team. So advertising is a way to test even more messaging at scale, right, because if you're just using organic, then you're inherently limited by your organic reach and you know, like your first and second and third order kind of connections and so, depending on what your CEO's network looks like or your executive's network, whoever you're building, they might not have, you know, the right people in the audience or maybe you're trying to penetrate like a new market that you know you're starting over from scratch, right. So the advertising can give you reach and kind of give you data at scale. Like what are people engaging with? And we've actually found just people liking or commenting, certainly, or reposting. People do this, they repost ads. But even just a like of an ad, like it, is a pretty decent intent signal of like hey, they're philosophically aligned with us. We run a lot of ads that are basically just probing for philosophical alignment and so that kind of hacked together intent data, if you will, from the ad platform is informative to messaging. It can be informative to ABM, right, like hey, a lot of people from this account seem to be interested in this message, like maybe that's how what we should use in outbound, right? So so that's one angle on the ad side.
Speaker 3:And then the sales development team is. I'd say we'd have a. We have a very like a senior level and advanced sales development team. Like they. They do a ton of personalization. We like really train our sales development team on like business acumen fundamentals. Like we really try to equip them to truly understand the business processes that are going on for our customers, rather than just like giving them scripts and having them read off. So it's a bit more of a career and not just like a job that burns people out type of thing. So they use SalesNav to do account research, prospect research, you know, and then do some degree of their outreach. But they're also using other channels as well.
Speaker 2:I think that's a good way to. You mentioned ads, right, but what are you doing in addition to what the CEO is doing organically? What sort of other flanking actions, whether it's ads or even other people internally to amplify, kind of take us through that a bit more, because I think it kind of you know the ceo is kind of the top of the pyramid, right, and then it moves out from there yeah.
Speaker 3:So, um, on linkedin specifically, we use uh, we do ads right and so we'll do, like single image ads for the most part, conversation ads too, and then we also use the thought leadership ad products so we can actually boost our CEO's organic posts in the ad platform. We don't do that for every post, but we certainly do it for some. And then we have a LinkedIn company page, and somebody told me something a long time ago which I has really resonated and stuck with me, which is, when you're doing a lot of ads and a lot of organic posting on a platform, the company page itself should sort of function as a result of seeing activity from people at the company or an ad from somebody at the company. So like, what kind of content is on there for them to see and how is that company page set up in order to basically convert them to take the next step of perhaps going to your website to continue to explore further?
Speaker 4:Give a shout out to my friend, mike Giannotti, who jumped on the Twitter feed. Mj, this is fascinating to me and I keep hearing this recurring theme and I know that you're obviously very passionate about the ability of marketing and executive leadership and sales being able to work closely together. I shared with you when we were in the green room prepping for this episode that I've had a lot of success in working with marketing very closely as a seller and a sales leader over the years, and it's been integral to my success because we're after the same goals. We're able to work in tandem. I'm able to be an advocate and an evangelist for what they do and create, but also helping them stay at the pulse of what matters to the field so that we can add value for each other.
Speaker 4:I'd love to hear your thoughts on. You know how should organizations today be thinking about this, because there's some change management involved here, right? You know this isn't necessarily a comfortable muscle for a lot of folks to have. You know their executives posting to you know have marketing and sales be working so closely? I mean you shared with me earlier that you know you've even gotten involved in some deals, so I'd love to hear more about your journey and your experience in that regard.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think there are like underlying obstacles in most cases when there's not sales and marketing alignment, and so I think the first step would be like diagnose what's really going on. I think one of the ones that I've seen is that, a lot of times, like, an org will have very senior sales talent and very junior marketing talent and very senior sales talent doesn't want to work with very junior marketing talent, right? So I think one of the first questions a lot of organizations need to ask themselves is, like are you hiring, um, people in marketing that are senior enough that they can be a partner to your sales talent? Um, I think, um, sometimes, uh, like, companies don't like, or the people in the roles don't necessarily respect or think about, like, the depth of experience that their counterparts have, right? So, for example, um, I see people say a lot, um, like marketing should be the most knowledgeable about the customer in the whole business, right, and I think, on the surface, like, oh yeah, it seems like something that's hard to argue with, right, like marketing should know a lot about the customer. However, it's hard to know more about the customer than someone who spends their entire day talking about customers, right? So I think that's almost that. That just saying that almost reveals that you're maybe like not respecting where your counterpart is coming from, right so? So I think marketing and sales should have both have deep knowledge of the customer, but kind of in different ways, right Like?
Speaker 3:Sales has a depth of knowledge that comes from speaking to customer after customer after customer. Um, that can sometimes be skewed by the last five conversations they have. It's more at like the surface, it's like really boots on the ground, specific problems that we're solving. But that is a depth of knowledge that you it just doesn't make sense to have. As a marketer, right Like, your job isn't to talk to customers all day. Marketing, I think, should have a broader knowledge of the customer. So you should talk to customers one-to-one. But there are other data points that go into that. There's market research, there's competitive analysis. You probably spend more time thinking through all the angles of certain kinds of messaging. So I think having an understanding and respect for the type of customer expertise that each counterpart brings to the table, and marketing making sure that they are doing some direct one-to-one talking to customers, because you can't function without it can make marketing and sales a lot better partners to each other.
Speaker 2:Related to that are your KPIs for marketing in alignment with sales? Are you, you know? Is your bonus or your outcome based around the revenue of the business? Or, you know? Because a lot of marketing areas is like, well, how many leads can we get, or how many MQLs can we get, and that right away creates misalignment.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we do two things from a metric standpoint to create alignment. The first one is we have really well-defined entry and exit criteria for all the stages in our sales process and I think if your pipeline numbers are not actually predicting revenue, then it's not necessarily the fact that you're bonusing people on pipeline, it's that you define pipeline in such a way that it doesn't predict revenue. So at Colab I think I mentioned when we were doing the prep for the call, like our stage one to stage two conversion rate is between 40 and 50% because it's really hard to even get into stage one for the way we've defined it right and because of that, because those criteria are tightly defined and it's a hard bar to clear even early stage pipeline is a predictor of revenue here and so as long as you've done that work, then I think you can align marketing and sales development to pipeline, and I would argue you should, because it's actually it's a lot easier to understand to connect the dots between the behaviors you need to do today to hit pipeline targets and it creates a quicker feedback loop.
Speaker 3:So as long as your pipeline is accurately predicting revenue, I think individual contributors in the marketing and sales development team should be bonused on pipeline I. I am bonused a hundred percent on revenue and I think that's also appropriate because in my role as the CMO, I can impact revenue. So things that I do, functions that I lead, don't just generate pipeline. They actually, you know, I do competitive positioning, I help with sales enablement right, like there's things that I do that I help the product right, I give insights on how to build the product right. So I do things that end up contributing both to the pipeline number and the revenue number and therefore it's appropriate for me to be going to start revenue.
Speaker 2:That's an interesting and when you know. You pointed out a couple of things there about being, you know, the KPI being pipeline, when you can actually measure the pipeline with some certainty and predictability, right, because then you actually have something that you can base some prediction around. But then going one step further with revenue, that's an interesting one. Carson, I mentioned your take on that. Do you think that that's the right sort of common KPI to align sales or marketing, or is it kind of getting the pipeline well-defined or the stages of the pipeline well-defined and then being able to kind of bonus or measure based around the pipeline?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean, look, it's probably not a one size fits all answer because there's going to be a lot of nuances to that, but I do think that the closer you can align those, the more you're creating and fostering that culture where sales and marketing can work together. And what I mean by that is, yes, I believe that the evolution over time I've definitely seen the, you know, the emphasis of, you know, creation of quality leads and where these advance in the pipeline. But then again, like what was the strength of the process by which they identified these leads and created these leads? We need to further refine and evolve that to make sure we're getting quality leads to sellers. You know, I I'm a seller and I go into my CRM and I see these leads that were generated by marketing and I call down on them and I get literally nothing out of it. That's not productive for either side. So you know all the more reason why I think it is important to have KPIs where you're aligned around the common theme, which is ultimately revenue and growth, where you're aligned around the common theme, which is ultimately revenue and growth. I even look at some of the marketing folks that I've worked with over the years and there is a lot of credence to that revenue component, as in. I know that a lot of them have been compensated based on revenue that they can show an influence of.
Speaker 4:It's very challenging from a marketing perspective to say, hey, we generated X amount of revenue. That's pretty impossible to do because that's very broad. You know, as MJ talked about today, there's so many different ways that you can put content out there in a way that will influence and we've all read the statistics that say that you know it could be five touches or eight touches that ultimately generate that, that call to action. So you know, a customer might have seen something from MJ's company page, then they might have seen a post from the CEO, then they might have seen a post from her and around that time somebody may have dialed them or emailed them. I'd be hard pressed to say, and then the salesperson gets the deal.
Speaker 4:I'd be hard pressed to say that marketing didn't influence that. So being able to show, more importantly, the marketing influence, those leads, that organization, these mediums where purchases are being made, and we can track that and trace that, that's all the more important because I would say revenue that is influenced by marketing is a very important metric, um, and then obviously revenue. All up is the uh, the rule by which we are all governed here in sales. So I do think that that is the ideal scenario. The closest closer that you can tie those together In some cases it's very hard to do it but the more that you can make them revenue based and also to make sure that you are giving marketing its due. The last thing that you want to do is ignore the fact that marketing is likely doing a lot to influence and educate even passively educate some of the customers that might become lower hanging fruit for our salespeople to pick off.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's worth acknowledging that in this conversation. I think most people understand the risks of over indexing on pipeline and under indexing on revenue, which is exactly what you explained. Like, if there's a bunch of MQLs, you call them and nothing happens, right, that's, that's a big risk, right, we're all wasting our time and it's probably the bigger risk of the two. However, I think what really gets talked about is the risk of over-indexing on revenue and under-indexing on pipeline, and I think the longer your sales cycle, the bigger that risk is right. So if you have a three-week sales cycle, that's not really that big of a risk because you're still going to get that rapid feedback loop.
Speaker 3:Like I'm an SDR, I book a meeting three weeks later it's either revenue or it's not revenue. Like that's actually a feedback loop that I can use to shift my behavior. But if I'm an SDR and I book a meeting and then nine months of sales activity happens and before I find out like the outcome, it's not a fast enough feedback loop and I don't know if it was the quality of the opportunity or all of the things that happened in the nine months in between that actually drove that outcome. So that's why I think at least for you know company selling enterprise software. You need to actually hedge against that risk as well of over indexing on just revenue. And so, like I said, I'm on 100 percent revenue. My team is 80 20. So 80 percent pipeline, 20 percent revenue.
Speaker 4:And find good ways to leverage MQL as an example, like me dialing one or five or 10 of them and going you know, oh for the room, there may be a high viability of that. But if I start to, as a seller, even take those MQLs and find meaningful ways to engage them, you know I've added them into my newsletter lists. I do my own homegrown webinars and will grab specialists to be the star of the show. I'm just going out and doing demand gen, but I've built lists over time in the thousands. I have a list right now of over 8,000 MQLs that I've gone out and accumulated, sometimes manually in our tools. But it's worth it because I can broadcast messages, I can get in front of people very quickly and it's a probability game.
Speaker 4:You know, if I'm dialing an MQL and nobody answers, that might have been a quote unquote, waste of time. But if I can message 8000 of them in one shot and get hundreds to show up to a webinar, even if they don't purchase immediately, it's a touch, it's a nudge, it's them being advanced in the funnel. And I've absolutely had deals where we looked at the purchase order come in. We're like where did this come from? What happened here? And we went back and found that this customer was on every webinar we ever did, even though a seller never talked to the person. So there's a number of ways that you can intelligently leverage MQLs. I always find that anytime you've got an ability to touch a customer, there's value.
Speaker 2:Just find a way that you can maybe do it more effectively at scale if you find that there's not quote unquote quality in the initial outreach what the MQL is and treat it the way that it should be treated, not as qualified, high intent pipeline, which is clearly different than what you're doing there. So, as we wrap up here, I have two quick questions for you, mj, that I think probably a lot of people are on people's minds. One is a lot of people we hear all the time my customer is not on LinkedIn, they're not there. They're not LinkedIn, they're not there, they're not listening, they're not watching, they're not watching posts. So my question would be is what would you say to them? And then, secondly, is if we can convince them that their customer is there, what would be one thing that they could do right now, like if they leave this show you would recommend as like a first step to kind of put people in that direction?
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, I mean you can actually find out if that's true or not, if your customer's on LinkedIn or not. You can. It's going to cost you a little bit of money, but go in, like set up a LinkedIn ads account. It's probably worth finding out right. Is your customer on LinkedIn or not? If you're basing a major business assumption on this, I don't know. I'll spend 2,500 bucks to find out. Go into LinkedIn ads, set up. You know LinkedIn ads has insane levels of targeting right Job title, industry, company name, company size, all this stuff.
Speaker 2:Put together the audience.
Speaker 3:That actually describes your ideal customer as close as you can, and it'll tell you how many members match those criteria. Okay, let's say it's 90,000. You haven't figured it out yet, by the way, because maybe there are 90,000 people in the audience theoretically. The next step is how many of these people actually log into LinkedIn within a 30-day period, and it's far fewer than the total audience size, right? So let's say you have an audience of 90,000 people, run a couple ads for 30 days and look at reach, which is a metric that LinkedIn ads will tell you about, and it'll be below the threshold of the total audience, because inevitably, not everyone in your audience logs into LinkedIn every day. But you will then have literal data that says okay, my audience is 90,000 and 25% of them saw my ads in this 30 day period.
Speaker 2:Now, you know how many of your customers are on LinkedIn right. That's a great hack and you can use the LinkedIn objective of reach right, so it's inexpensive because it's the reach camp. The reach objective is generally less expensive than conversions or other things that are there. So put your list in there, see what your reach is, and that gives you an idea of the percentage that are likely touched. I think that's what you're saying and I think that's a very that's awesome. That's a great hack.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you can find out and then, once you know, I guess, what do you do with that information, right? Do we like, do we want to go the paid route or the organic route, obviously paid?
Speaker 3:you're hacking the numbers game by paying a little extra money, right, you're in front of people more often and it's guaranteed, and so if you need fast results, that's probably something to consider. Or you go the organic route or you do both right. The organic route, I think, gives you that human-to-human connection. It gives you, like, a depth of content that you might not convey overpaid. It's more of a long game, certainly, but you can speed it up by proactively going out and connecting with your ideal prospects. You can't do that too much or else LinkedIn will put you in LinkedIn jail for being spammy. But, yeah, go out there and start connecting with people, just so that they see your content and building that community.
Speaker 2:That's great, Awesome Carson. Any final questions before we.
Speaker 4:No, I want to give MJ the last word. Mj, anything else that you think our audience would benefit from, just from your experiences and the experiences of your organization in the topics that we talked about today.
Speaker 3:I think, if I could summarize some of the stuff that we've been digging into, like, every marketing and sales work kind of keeps running into the same things, right? Whether it's alignment challenges or I can't get my CEO to post on LinkedIn I think the best thing you can do is do that. Five whys exercise. Why is your CEO not posting on LinkedIn? Because they don't have the time? Why don't they have the time? Right? Diagnose the root cause and figure out what you can do about that. Right, In our case it was let's really align on the messaging, which is something that the CEO definitely is worth his time, right.
Speaker 3:And then, because we're so aligned on the messaging, we can do some of the work on his behalf. Right, and he actually wants to use it because, again, it's aligned with thoughts and feelings that he has about the market and it also helped us everywhere else, right. So that's an example where the answer to that question it's a little bit deeper and maybe more nuanced than people would lead you to believe in like an influencer LinkedIn post about this topic. So look for those root causes in your business, because most of the time it is complex. That's why every organization on the planet seems to have the same set of challenges. You know they're hard to solve.
Speaker 4:Really, there's a lot of our partner organizations that I'm hoping are watching this today. There's a lot of C-levels CEOs that could and should be out there. It would have a tremendous impact to their organization.
Speaker 2:Yeah, MJ, thank you Really really good stuff. You definitely delivered on the practical like we talked about. I think these are some really good stuff. I know I'm going to go back and listen again and take some notes. So thank you, and we'll keep an eye on collab. We'll follow. I want to see how this all kind of plays out.
Speaker 3:You can follow Adam. You can see what he posted out.
Speaker 2:I'll follow him. Yeah, and what is what is Adam's? Adam Heating, we're on LinkedIn, okay, okay, and the company any pages? Collab software? Yep C-O-L-B Collab software. Okay, that's awesome, We'll check it out, all right. Well, thanks everybody. Hope this was enjoyable and valuable to everybody. Carson.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. This was great, MJ. Thank you, Audience. Thank you and until next time happy, modern selling.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us today on Mastering Modern Selling. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe for more insights, connect with us on social media and leave a review to help us improve. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we will continue to uncover modern strategies shaping today's business landscape. Learn more about Fistbump and our concierge service at GetFistbumpscom. Mastering modern revenue creation with Fistbump, where relationships, social and AI meet in the buyer-centric age.